Gido van de Ven wins the Gotch Memorial Prize 2014

Gido van de Ven wins the Gotch Memorial Prize 2014

Gido van de Ven wins the Gotch Memorial Prize 2014

Warm congratulations to MRC Unit student Gido van de Ven for winning the Gotch Memorial Prize 2014, which is given for the best Oxford D.Phil. Transfer Status report of a graduate student in the field of Physiology. The prize comes with an award of £1,000.

For his D.Phil. thesis research, Gido has implemented an unsupervised statistical method to identify and track cell assemblies from multi-unit recordings. Applied to tetrode recordings in the hippocampus of freely-moving mice, this method was shown to identify assemblies with strong spatial tuning that are reactivated during subsequent sleep and reinstated upon re-exposure to the same environment. To study the causal role of cell assembly dynamics in the formation, consolidation and retrieval of spatial memory, Gido has also implemented a closed-loop optogenetic feedback system to transiently silence hippocampal assemblies during on-line detected sharp-wave/ripples events. Gido's DPhil research is supervised by Dr. David Dupret.