Speakers
Prof. Marianne Fyhn
Marianne Fyhn is Professor in Neuroscience at the University of Oslo, Norway. In her research, she uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand basic principles for brain plasticity, learning and memory in rodents. She applies a combination of in vivo electrophysiology, imaging and genetic tools to record from and perturb neural network functions. Fyhn was seminal for the discovery of grid cells which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 to MB and E Moser. In her recent work, she has investigated the role of specialized extracellular matrix molecules for memory processing and the grid cell network. She will also present ongoing research on neural mechanisms of visual association learning in the parahippocampal network.
Prof. Laura Andreae
Laura Andreae studied medicine at Cambridge and UCL, and practised as a doctor for a few years before seeing the light! She did her PhD with Andrew Lumsden in developmental neurobiology at King’s College London followed by a postdoc with Tim Bliss working on LTP and plasticity at the NIMR in Mill Hill, UK and with Juan Burrone on synaptic vesicle cycling at King’s. She set up her own lab at King’s at the end of 2013. Her lab works on synapse and circuit development in health and in context of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Prof. Lisa Marshall
Lisa Marshall studied biology and received her doctoral degree at the Institute of Physiology (Humboldt-University of Berlin, Charité, Peter Bartsch). At the Institute of Neuroendocrinology (University of Lübeck, Jan Born) she began her research on sleep. During a Habilitation scholarship in 2000 she was a research fellow at the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience (NJ, USA, György Buzsáki). In 2009 Lisa Marshall became Professor for Behavioral Neurobiology at the Dept. of Neuroendocrinology, and in 2014 at the Institute of Experimental & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology (University of Lübeck, Markus Schwaninger). As head of the Research Group Neuroplasticity and Rhythms, her present research on mice and humans focuses on the factors and mechanisms through which sleep-associated memory consolidation is modulated.
Daniel McNamee, PhD
Daniel McNamee leads the Natural Intelligence group at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. He acquired his undergraduate degree in Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin, his PhD in Computation & Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology, and held a postdoctoral fellowship jointly associated between the University of Cambridge and University College London.
Christian Machens, PhD
Christian Machens is a principal investigator at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal. He studied physics in Tubingen, Germany, and in Stony Brook, New York, and received a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, in 2002. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, before taking a faculty position at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2007. In 2011, he joined the newly formed Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Foundation. In his research, he seeks to understand how networks of neurons communicate and process information. His work combines the statistical analysis of neural population activity with the computational modeling of spiking neural networks.
Dirk Schubert, PhD
Dirk Schubert is research group leader and principle lecturer at the Cognitive Neuroscience Dept. of the RadboudUMC in Nijmegen, Netherland. He obtained his PhD in biology at the HHU Düsseldorf (Germany). There, trained as electrophysiologist, he focused on understanding fundamental aspects of the structural and functional organisation of cortical Excitatory/Inhibitory (E/I) neuronal networks. After a research fellowship at the University of Szeged (Hungary) and a postdoctoral position at the HHU Medical Centre Düsseldorf, he moved to the RadboudUMC to start his lab for “Cellular Neurophysiology”. He and his group currently combine translational research on rodent cortical network development with human stem cells derived neuronal models, the so-called “human brain in the dish” approach, for studying molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying altered E/I balance in monogenic neurodevelopmental disorders associated with intellectual disability, SZ, ASD and epilepsy.
David Belin, PhD
David Belin is Professor of Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology of the University of Cambridge and the Director of Studies in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Homerton College. Professor Belin was born in Blois, France in 1979. When he was ten he moved to Bordeaux where he graduated in 2005 in Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology at the University of Bordeaux 2. During his PhD he developed the first preclinical model of cocaine addiction based in the operationalization of multiple clinical criteria of the pathology as defined in humans. Professor Belin then moved to the laboratory of Professor Barry Everitt at the Department of Experimental Psychology of the University of Cambridge in January 2006. With his mentor he investigated the corticostriatal mechanisms of cocaine seeking habits and the relationships between impulsivity and compulsive cocaine self-administration, leading to a breakthrough in our understanding of the neurological and psychological mechanisms subserving individual vulnerability to cocaine addiction. In 2009 David Belin tenured at the INSERM in France and established his INSERM team in Poitiers which focused on the psychological, neural and cellular mechanisms of the individual vulnerability to develop compulsive disorders and their modulation by the environment. Soon it became apparent that Cambridge is where he wanted to carry out his research and he came back in October 2013, being appointed Lecturer at the Department of Pharmacology. He moved back to the Department of Psychology in October 2016, as the head of the CLIC Cambridge Laboratory for research Impulsive & Compulsive disorders. Professor Belin has published over 75 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He has received the Mémain-Pelletier Award from the French Academy of Science and the Young Investigator Award from the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society. He is an adjunct professor at Mount Sinai (New York, USA), an alumnus of the FENS/Kavli Network of Excellence, a former International Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Science and a former visiting scientist at NIDA.