International Graduate School of Neuroscience

Research Interests

Our goal is to understand  how the hippocampus, the brain’s main structure for declarative, episodic and associative memory,   creates, updates and retains complex memories that last for long periods  of time.  We study this in healthy subjects but also in the context of brain disease’s such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

Our approach incorporates a highly multidisciplinary neuroscientific strategy that fuses electrophysiological recordings at the field, multi-unit, and single-unit levels, to examine cortical and synaptic plasticity, place and head direction cells, as well as neuronal oscillations recordings in freely behaving rodents. Cutting-edge novel methodology including brain imaging using wide-field calcium imaging, functional in situ hybridisation, and functional magnetic resonance imaging enable us to scrutinize systemic processes, whereas cellular processes are examined using optogenetic, neuropharmacological,  biochemical, and molecular biological approaches, both in vivo and in vitro.

Our team is highly international  and possesses a strong critical mass of technical and theoretical expertise that is implemented to enable rapid and intensive training of our doctoral students.

PhD Projects

• Place cell and head direction cell recordings during learning in physical and virtual spatial environments to examine how sensory information is used as a substrate for memory formation (behavior, single-unit recordings from the rodent brain advanced signal analysis approaches, optogenetics)
• Investigation of the role of the hippocampus in the integration of sensory information to enable long-term memory (in vivo electrophysiological field potential recordings, optogenetics, behavior, fMRI, optogenetics)
• Examination of the contributions of catecholaminergic structures to memory acquisition, updating, and retention (optogenetics, in vivo electrophysiology, behavioral paradigms)
• Investigation of the role of corticofugal information processing in the fine-tuning of sensory perception
• (Immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridisation, behavior, in vivo electrophysiology, optogenetics)
• Investigation of the underlying mechanisms of hippocampal deficits in brain disease (behavior, animal models of brain disease such as AD, in vitro electrophysiology, fMRI. transgenic models)
• Scrutiny of of the functional and systemic basis of spatial appetitive extinction learning (Immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridisation, chemogenetics, behavior, in vivo electrophysiology)
• Examination of dialog between hippocampus and cortex in the acquisition updating and long-term storage of memories (in situ hybridisation, chemogenetics, optogenetics, behavior, in vivo electrophysiology, advanced signal analysis)

Applied Methods

• Stereotactic electrode implantations for long-term recordings of single-unit, multi-unit, or field potentials from rats or mice
• Intracerebral and intrahippocampal treatments for neuropharmacological analysis
• Optical imaging /wide-field calcium imaging in vivo
• Electrophysiological analysis of cortical and synaptic plasticity, place cells, head direction cells, transstructural communication, or neuronal oscillations in the brains of freely behaving rodents
• Patch clamp, multielectrode array, and field potential recordings in vitro
• Intracortical and intrahippocampal EEG analysis
• Optogenetics and chemogenetics
• Transgenic mouse models
• Animal models of brain disease
• Western blot, rtPCR, pull-down assay
• In situ hybridisation, immunohistochemistry, histological analysis
• Behavioral analysis of learning (t-maze, radial maze, open field, delayed matching to sample task, object recognition, startle response analysis etc…)
• fMRI in rats and mice