Sook-Lei Liew

Dr. Sook-Lei Liew completed her undergraduate education at Rice University where she earned bachelor’s degrees in Kinesiology (with a concentration in Sports Medicine) and English. She received her Master of Arts degree in Occupational Therapy from the University of Southern California with a focus on adult rehabilitation. She remained at USC and completed her PhD in Occupational Science (with a concentration in Cognitive Neuroscience) investigating, with her advisor Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, experience-dependent changes in the motor system during action observation using neuroimaging and behavioral methods.

From 2012 to 2014, Dr. Liew was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the NIH under the guidance of Dr. Leonardo Cohen, where she studied mechanisms of neural plasticity and neural repair using noninvasive brain stimulation and brain-computer interfaces, specifically, real-time fMRI neurofeedback. During her postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Liew also completed collaborations at the University of Tübingen (with Drs. Niels Birbaumer and Surjo Soekadar) and at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (with Dr. Pablo Celnik) to examine the use of brain-computer interfaces with stroke patients and noninvasive brain stimulation to enhance motor learning in healthy individuals, respectively. She joined the USC Chan Division in January 2015.

EDUCATION

• Post-Doctoral Fellow, Human Cortical Physiology and Neurorehabilitation, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, 2014
• Doctor of Philosophy, Occupational Science, Concentration: Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Southern California, 2012
• Master of Arts, Occupational Therapy, University of Southern California, 2008
• Bachelor of Arts, Kinesiology/English, Rice University, 2006