Research Project
Dr
Anna Hudson
Current Appointments
Senior Research Fellow (Honorary)
Senior Research Fellow, Flinders University
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, UNSW
Key Research Areas
Anna Hudson completed her doctorate at NeuRA and UNSW in 2010. With the support of a NHMRC Fellowship and a Lung Foundation Australia/Boehringer Ingelheim COPD Research Fellowship, she completed postdoctoral studies at Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris and NeuRA. She is now based at the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute Sleep Health (formerly the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health) as co-lead of the Sleep Apnoea & Respiratory Physiology theme.
Anna’s research aims to understand respiratory physiology and pathophysiology, for example in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and healthy ageing. She uses a multi-faceted approach to investigate the neural control of breathing, e.g. electromyography to assess respiratory muscle activity, electroencephalography to assess brain activity and respiratory sensation and ultrasound for respiratory muscle mechanics.
Anna is most well-known for single motor unit recordings from human respiratory muscles that implicate the spinal cord as the site of integration of multiple descending neural drives to the motoneurones. She established the ‘principle of motor unit recruitment by neuromechanical matching’, which is applicable to all movements we make and is relevant to the broader field of motor control.
Publications
2025 Aug
Myths and methodologies: Invasive and non‐invasive assessment of respiratory muscle activity in humans
View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1113/EP091526
2025 Aug
Neural control of human inspiratory muscles. What have we learnt from the study of single motor units?
View full journal-article on https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/en/publications/ed095f15-affe-4217-818d-e75705f1a496
2025 Aug
The potential role of the anterior insular cortex and interoception on dyspnea in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
View full journal-article on https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/en/publications/dda974a6-a9b8-4d12-b22f-827ed34e9835
2025 Jun
The Effects of Low-Dose Morphine on Sleep and Breathlessness in COPD
View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chest.2024.11.040
2025, 01 Jan
Detection and perception of inspiratory resistive loads in older adults with and without chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00398.2024
2024 Oct
Relationships between daily step count and sleep in over 30 million person-days of real-world longitudinal monitoring data
View full other on https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/en/publications/095f2399-c1a4-4d99-a56b-41ce3a44b2e6
2024 Sep
Cycle-frequency content EEG analysis improves the assessment of respiratory-related cortical activity
View full journal-article on https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/en/publications/8a95c8b1-9cfe-4fc0-9018-2940c888e98e
2024, 01 Apr
Graded onset of parasternal intercostal inspiratory activity detected with surface electromyography in healthy young females and males
View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00604.2023
2024 Mar
Are we getting enough sleep? Frequent irregular sleep found in an analysis of over 11 million nights of objective in-home sleep data
View full journal-article on https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/en/publications/aebef856-3f7b-4c3b-9c78-9635f4c4bc2c
2023 Jun
Thinking versus feeling
View full journal-article on https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/en/publications/e9d851a7-5348-4849-9c83-84f312dbedf4
Anna's research projects and related news
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