Professor John O’Keefe
The Journey to the Hippocampal Cognitive Map
Wednesday 15th April, 12.30pm – 1.25pm | Pentland Auditorium, EICC
The Wolstencroft Memorial Lecture
John Wolstencroft was an international expert on the pharmacology of the brain. He carried out pioneering studies on chemical transmitters of brain neurone activity in 1960s. He held a personal chair in Physiology at the University of Birmingham. He was a founder member of the British Neuroscience Association and was its President from 1977-1980. John Wolstencroft’s early unexpected death in 1983 led his colleagues and family to set up a fund in 1986 to support a lecture to be given by a scientist who has made an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the working of the brain. The lecture to be given biennially at the British Neuroscience Association’s National meeting. The purpose of the lecture is to communicate the most exciting and important advances in brain science.
Biography
John O’Keefe, FRSFMedSci is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Department of Anatomy at University College London. He is known for his discovery of place cells in the hippocampus and his discovery that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. In 2014, he received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience “for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition”, together with Brenda Milner and Marcus Raichle. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser. He has recently become the inaugural head of the new Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, a new research centre in neural circuits and behaviour at UCL.
Professor O’Keefe is a past-President of the British Neuroscience Association.
Research Interests
Current Research and Interests include: Neural basis of cognition and memory, in particular spatial cognition and memory. Function of the hippocampus and related temporal lobe structures. Use of virtual reality in conjunction with imaging of the human brain. Navigation in robots. Neural network models.
