We are pleased to welcome Dr Lazzaro di Biase to the Unit. Lazzaro is visiting for six months and is a neurologist in Professor Vincenzo Di Lazzaro’s group at the University Campus Bio-Medico, Rome. Lazzaro has been collecting data on patients with tremor in Rome, and will analyse these during his stay in Professor Peter Brown’s Group in the Unit. Together, the Rome and Oxford groups have been exploring whether a simple measure of tremor can distinguish between different aetiologies (see Brittain et al. 2015). During Lazzaro’s time at the Unit, he will also learn how to record local field potentials from the brains of patients who have undergone functional neurosurgery.

The Unit held its second Science Day on Friday 18th December 2015. Ongoing and future research projects were the focus of discussion, and Unit members and visitors eagerly took the opportunity to give the constructive criticism that is needed to foster world-leading research. There were 11 talks and 9 poster presentations, most of which were given by the Unit’s students and early-career scientists. Unit Deputy Director Peter Magill commented “It was fantastic to see how the next generation of our talented scientists are thriving in the Unit, and to learn from their discoveries and insights.”

Our congratulations go to Unit D.Phil student Colin McNamara, who defended his doctoral thesis, entitled “Relating the midbrain dopaminergic system to hippocampal cell assembly dynamics associated with spatial memory function”, in his viva voce examination on Tuesday 8th December 2015.

Colin's examiners were Prof. David Bannerman (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford) and Dr. Matt Jones (School of Physiology and Pharmacology, Bristol University). Colin was the first student supervised by Dr David Dupret, in co-supervision with Prof. Peter Magill, and was the recipient of a Doctoral Training Award from the Medical Research Council.

Picture, from left to right: Dr. David Dupret, Colin, Dr Matt Jones and Prof David Bannerman.

We are pleased to welcome Dr Vitor Lopes dos Santos to the Unit. Vitor graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2011, and obtained his Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2015 at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. Vítor's PhD research was supervised by Prof. Adriano Tort to develop a new framework for the analysis of neuronal assemblies and their temporal dynamics. In 2012, Vítor received a Science Without Borders grant from the Ministry of Education of Brazil to spend a year in the Centre for System Neuroscience of Leicester University, where he developed new methods for extracting information from spike trains under the supervision of Prof. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga. Back in Brazil in 2013, Vitor completed his PhD work on hippocampal network physiology with Prof. Sidarta Ribeiro and Prof. Richardson Leão.

Vitor joined the Unit as an Investigator Scientist in November 2015 to work in the Dupret Group where he will continue to focus on hippocampal cell assembly dynamics and investigate how they coordinate to other areas during learning and memory processes.

Unit Director Peter Brown is one of the chief investigators on a newly-awarded grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. The grant, administrated by the University of Melbourne, is entitled “Closed-loop deep brain stimulation: Optimising treatment of Parkinson’s disease using adaptive stimulation”. The research will run over four years, during which the goal will be to develop closed-loop deep brain stimulation as a treatment for people with Parkinson’s disease.

On 3rd November, the Unit hosted a workshop on Oscillations and Novel Interventional Therapies (OnIt) at Brasenose College, Oxford. The OnIt workshop was arranged by BNDU Director Peter Brown and involved members of his Group and the Unit Groups of Rafal Bogacz and Andrew Sharott, together with visitors from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, the Bernstein Center, Freiburg, and the Biomedical Electronics Translational Research Center, Hsinchu, and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and University, Taipei, Taiwan. The small, intensive meeting proved to be an excellent opportunity for biologists, clinicians, engineers and mathematicians to interact and forge collaborations directed towards advancing scientific discoveries from bench to bedside.

A warm welcome to Dr Eduardo Martin Moraud, who joins the Group of Rafal Bogacz to work on the design and implementation of computational models to guide the optimisation of closed-loop ‘deep brain stimulation’ paradigms in Parkinson’s disease. Eduardo completed his Ph.D. in Neural Engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in the labs of Prof. Micera and Prof Courtine, where he worked on the development of predictive models and closed-loop control algorithms for spinal-cord stimulation after spinal cord injury. Eduardo is fascinated by the idea of developing smart technologies that dynamically interact with the nervous system, in particular in the context of personalizing neuroprosthetic interventions and treatments.

Alexander Morley has joined Dr David Dupret's Group as a D.Phil. student. Alex has previously worked in Dr. Bains’ lab at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute in Canada, where his project was focused on using optogenetic and immunohistochemical techniques to delineate a novel stress-related neuronal circuit.

Over the next few years, Alex will perform multi-channel extracellular recordings to investigate how oscillatory communication between the hippocampus and its connected brain circuits contributes to multi-modal information processing for the purpose of memory and adaptive behaviours.

We are pleased to welcome Miss Barbara Schaffran to the Unit as a visiting student working under the supervision of Dr Paul Dodson.

Barbara is currently undertaking a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany, and will be working on her thesis project in the Magill Group. During her time in the Unit, Barbara will investigate in vivo firing properties of midbrain dopaminergic neurons in a mouse model of Parkinson's disease.

Barbara completed her Bachelor’s thesis at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn, Germany, where she performed in vivo time-lapse imaging in developing Drosophila larva sensory neurons under the supervision of Dr Gaia Tavosanis.

Welcome to Nils Kurzawa, who will spend his European Erasmus scholarship in the Unit this summer. Nils is a 2nd year MSc student in Biotechnology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His research interests focus on the interface of Computer Science and Biology. Nils joins Rafal Bogacz's Group and will work on computational modelling of human learning in decision-making processes.