Dr.med. Katarina Rukavina is a Neurologist and Movement Disorders PhD fellow to Professor K Ray Chaudhuri at the Parkinson Foundation Centre of Excellence at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London.
Katarina’s foremost research interest lies in the Parkinson’s disease (PD) related impairment of pain processing pathways. Driven by a desire to understand, and to be able to modulate the experience of pain in individuals with PD, Katarina works jointly with basic neuroscientists on projects involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), quantitative sensory testing (QST), and analysis of blood biomarkers and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).
Katarina obtained her medical degree from University of Zagreb School of Medicine, where she received a Dean’s Award of Academic Excellence for her outstanding academic achievements. Following that, she successfully completed her speciality training in Neurology in Hamburg, Germany. In addition to her clinical training, she has been working on several basic
neuroscience projects, particularly addressing the neuroinflammation associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Katarina’s doctoral thesis (Dr.med.) on the microglial activation in rapidly progressive dementias got the predicate “Summa cum laude”
(University Medical Centre Hamburg – Eppendorf).
Katarina has pubished several peer-reviewed articles including in press material and has started presenting her research work at international conferences. She is a member of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society (IPMDS) and is a co-cordinator of the subgroup ‘Pain and sensory symptoms’ within the IPMDS Non-motor Parkinson’s disease study group (NM-PD-SG). Furthermore, she is a member of the Association of British Neurologists (ABN), the Association of German Neurologists
(Deutsche Gesellschaft für Neurologie, DGN), German Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Parkinson und Bewegüngsstörungen, DPG) and European Academy of Neurology, Resident and Research Fellow Section (EAN, RRFS).
