Professor Susumu Tonegawa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA – Nobel Laureate for Physiology or Medicine, 1987
Memory engram cells have come of age
Sunday, 12th April, 09:45 – 10:45, Pentland Suite
Biography:
Susumu Tonegawa received his Ph.D. from UCSD. He then undertook postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego, before working at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland, where he performed his landmark immunology experiments. Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for “his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity”. He has since continued to make important contributions but in an entirely different field: neuroscience. Using advanced techniques of gene manipulation, Tonegawa is now unraveling the molecular, cellular and neural circuit mechanisms that underlie learning and memory. His studies have broad implications for psychiatric and neurologic diseases. Tonegawa is currently the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at MIT, as well as the Director of RIKEN Brain Science Institute. He is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Research Interests:
Learning and memory are vital for day-to-day living — from finding our way home to playing tennis to giving a cohesive speech. Some of us have personally witnessed the devastating consequences of memory disorders, whether it’s the severe inability to form new memories, as seen in Alzheimer’s patients, or difficulty in suppressing a recall of a memory of a highly unpleasant experience, as seen in PTSD patients. The main research interest in Susumu Tonegawa’s laboratory is to decipher brain mechanisms subserving learning and memory. They seek to understand what happens in the brain when a memory is formed, when a fragile short-term memory is consolidated to a solid long-term memory, and when a memory formed previously is recalled on subsequent occasions. The laboratory also seeks to understand the role of memory in decision-making, and how various external or internal factors, such as reward, punishment, attention and the subject’s emotional state, affect learning and memory. In summary, they study how the central nervous system in the brain enables our mind, with a focus on learning and memory.
Please click here for more information.
Professor Susumu Tonegawa’s plenary lecture is sponsored by F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.
Professor Dame Kay E Davies, University of Oxford, UK
Role of oxidative stress in neurodegeneration
Monday, 13th April, 11:15 – 12:15, Pentland Suite
Biography:
Kay Davies is the Dr Lee’s Professor of Anatomy in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Director of the MRC Functional Genomics Unit at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in the molecular analysis and development of treatment for human genetic disease, particularly, Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and the application of genomics for the analysis of neurological disorders and gene-environment interactions. She has published more than 400 papers and won numerous awards for her work. She is a founding fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. She has been a Governor of the Wellcome Trust since 2008 and became Deputy Chairman in October, 2013. She was made Dame Commander of the British Empire for services to science in 2008.
Research Interests:
Dame Kay Davies’ research is focused on the understanding of muscle disease, movement and behavioural disorders having developed various genetic models in order to understand disease pathogenesis as well as to develop effective treatments. Her research group has an international reputation for work on Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). In the 1980s, she developed a test which allowed for the screening of foetuses whose mothers have a high risk of carrying DMD. The studies carried out in her research group range from the analysis of single gene defects such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) to the use of genetic models which provide insights into the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases such as ataxia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), as well as mental impairment and schizophrenia.
Please click here for more information.
Professor Dame Kay E Davies’ plenary lecture is sponsored by Johnson & Johnson Innovation.
Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti, University of Parma, Italy
Understanding others: a neural mechanism
Monday, 13th April, 18:15 – 17:15, Pentland Suite
Biography:
Professor Rizzolatti received his degree in medicine from the University of Padua, Italy, where he specialized in neurology. After postdoctoral work at the University of Pisa’s Institute of Physiology, Dr Rizzolatti joined the University of Parma where he became Full Professor of Human Physiology in 1975. He was then made Director of the University of Parma’s Department of Neuroscience. He is currently Director of the Parma Brain Center for Social and Motor Cognition, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). His honours include membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Académie Française des Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, USA. He is a past President of both the European Brain and Behaviour Society and the Italian Neuroscience Society. Most recently, he was awarded the 2014 Brain Prize by the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation, jointly with Professors Trevor Robbins and Stanislas Dehaen.
Research Interests:
Professor Rizzolatti is well known for his work on the primate motor system and its role in the control of visually guided movements such as reaching and grasping. In 1996, this work lead to his ground-breaking discovery of “mirror neurons” in the premotor cortex which discharge not only when animals move, but also when they observe such movements made by others. This has been credited as being one of the most significant discoveries about the primate brain in recent years, and has inspired many research programmes that attempt to understand the role of the mirror neurons in imitation and social cognition.
Please click here for more information.
Professor Lorraine Tyler, University of Cambridge, UK
From perception to conception: the evolution of meaning along the ventral stream
Tuesday, 14th April, 11:15 – 12:15, Pentland Suite
Biography:
Professor Tyler gained her PhD from the University of Chicago in the Department of Behavioural Sciences. She worked at the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) before moving to the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and from there to Birkbeck College University of London. She returned to Cambridge in 1998. Lorraine Tyler is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. She heads the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain and the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (CamCan).
Research Interests:
Professor Tyler’s interdisciplinary research combines cognitive models with multi-modal imaging to understand the neurobiological substrate for language functions, and the extent to which they are adaptive and capable of reorganisation following either brain damage or the normal brain changes that occur with healthy ageing.
Research in her lab also studies object processing in the ventral stream, using fMRI and MEG to construct a neurobiological account of how visual inputs become meaningful objects over time.
Please click here for more information.
Professor Thomas M Jessell, Columbia University, USA
Strategies and circuits for motor control
Tuesday, 14th April, 17:15 – 18:15, Pentland Suite
Biography:
Dr. Thomas M Jessell is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the Claire Tow Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. For his work, he has received honours including the Gruber Prize, the Gairdner International Award, the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, and many more. He is a co-editor of the well-known textbook ‘Principles of Neural Science’. Dr. Jessell is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests:
Research in the Jessell lab explores the developmental wiring and mature function of neural circuits that provide mammals with the ability to act on demand, through the neural control of movement. His studies focus on the neural circuits that control two forms of motor behavior that rely on limb musculature: locomotion and goal-directed reaching. In one approach, his aims to define the cellular rules and molecular mechanisms that direct the intricate wiring of these circuits. In parallel, he has used insights into the molecular origins of neuronal identity to devise more precise genetic methods to monitor and manipulate the activity of defined neuronal classes, permitting the lab to delve into the design of circuits and systems responsible for the planning and execution of movement.
Please click here for more information.
Professor Annette C Dolphin, University College London, UK
Neuronal voltage-gated calcium channels: from channel trafficking to therapy for neuropathic pain
Wednesday, 15th April, 11:00 – 11:55, Pentland Suite
Biography:
Professor Dolphin studied Biochemistry at Oxford University, and completed her PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, where she first became interested in neuropharmacology. She then undertook postdoctoral studies in Paris, Yale, and the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill (London), and is currently Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology at UCL.
Research Interests:
Professor Dolphin and her research group seek to understand the function of neuronal voltage-gated calcium channels, and the mechanism of action of drugs that target these channels. Her current work is centred on the role of accessory subunits, β and α2δ, and the manner in which these subunits modulate channels, and the ways in which these interactions are affected in disease states or by drugs.
Please click here for more information.
Professor Richard G M Morris, University of Edinburgh, UK
The making, keeping and losing of memory
Wednesday, 15th April, 16:40 – 17:40, Pentland Suite
Biography:
Professor Richard Morris obtained his MA in Natural Sciences at University of Cambridge and his D.Phil. at Sussex University. Following a Lectureship at the University of St Andrews in 1977, he moved to Edinburgh in 1986. Professor Morris is presently Director of the Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems (CCNS) and Caro Almela Professor of Neurobiology in Alicante, Spain. He has served on various Scientific Advisory Boards (including the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science), as President of both the British Neuroscience Association (1994-96) and Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (2006-08), and was seconded as Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust (2007-10). Professor Morris was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (1997) and awarded the honour of CBE in 2007. He was recently awarded a 2014 Royal Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Research Interests:
Professor Morris’ research group is interested in understanding the making, keeping and losing of memory. Their studies focus on the functions of the hippocampal formation in memory and the impact of subcortical neuromodulatory inputs on memory encoding and cellular consolidation. They also study hippocampal-neocortical interactions in the context of systems consolidation and knowledge acquisition.
Some important achievements and discoveries of his lab include the development of the watermaze which is now widely used to study spatial learning, the role of NMDA receptors in spatial learning, and the co-development of the synaptic tagging and capture hypothesis of long-term potentiation. The group also has interests in translational neuroscience, and is engaged in adapting some of their novel behavioural tasks for work on cognitive function in animal models of neurodegeneration such as Alzheimer’s Disease.
Please click here for more information.
Professor Richard Morris’ plenary lecture is sponsored by Lundbeck.
