Richard Morris' Plenary Lecture

Richard Morris gave the Opening Plenary lecture at a meeting on 14 May 2013 in Brussels entitled ‘European Brain Research: successes and next challenges’.  This conference, attended by over 350 people from across Europe, addressed issues to do with planning the contribution of brain research to the Horizon 2020 framework of EU funding for research, and issues related to advocacy.

Richard Morris 'threshold'

Richard Morris has just crossed a kind of a threshold.  As a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science magazine, he looks over manuscripts submitted at the ‘triage’ stage prior to the office deciding whether or not to send a paper out for review. A couple of Board members are used for every manuscript. Richard has now just completed his 500th review for Science since he joined the Board in 2007.

Emma Wood at the BNA Christmas Symposium

Emma Wood gave a talk entitled "Going home for Christmas, but how do we get there? The neuroscience of navigation" at the recent BNA Christmas Symposium which was held at the Royal Society on December 19th. Other speakers were John O'Keefe and Francesca Cacucci (UCL), Paul Graham (Sussex), Dora Biro (Oxford), Carlo de Lillo (Leicester) and jan Wiener (Bournemouth). The following British Neuroscience Association Awards were presented by Professor David Nutt, President of the BNA, Imperial College London:
    Public Understanding of Neuroscience: Claudia Hammond
    Contribution to Neuroscience: Professor Steven Rose
    Undergraduate award 2012: Lewis Hou, University of Edinburgh
    Postgraduate award 2012: Florence Fricker, King’s College London

Patient HM - Fringe Play

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe presently has a play about Patient HM – whose life was tragically affected by the bilateral hippocampectomy conducted to relieve his epilepsy but whose consequence was his profound amnesia.  The importance of HM to neuropsychological research cannot be overestimated – but what of his life?  Before the operation and after?  

The play is called 2401 Objects and is on in the late afternoon at "The Pleasance Beyond".  The final performance is on 28 August and this will be followed by a discussion session to be held in The Informatics Forum about the issues raised by the play (and HM's involvement in research).

Research Strategy in China

The Director of CCNS, Richard Morris, is quoted in the attached article from an article in the 4 August issue of Nature.  It concerns the controversial but effective policies that Mu-ming Poo has pursued in Shanghai in building up what is arguably the most prominent basic neuroscience centre in China.  Richard Morris is a member of its Advisory Board.

The neurobiology of schemas: knowledge acquisition and consolidation (NEUROSCHEMA)

Professor Richard Morris, FRS (Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems) has been successful in securing the first European Research Council Advanced Investigator award in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.  He will hold this grant, for Euro 3.05 Million, jointly with Professor Dr Guillen Fernandez of the Donders Institute for Neuromaging in Nijmegen, Holland.

The aim of the work is to take a radically new step towards analysis of the neuroscience of learning and memory that, for the first time, will incorporate ideas about the role of prior-knowledge and schema.  Such ideas have long been discussed and analysed by experimental psychologists and computer scientists.  However, existing neurobiological models of the encoding, storage and consolidation of new information in the brain have, to date, barely incorporated the role of prior knowledge into models of the mechanisms involved.

A coordinated programme of research will examine the neurobiological basis of schemas, and involving both animal experimentation (involving optogenetics) and functional magnetic resonance imaging of the human brain using new cognitive tasks.   The grant will also include a translational project reaching into the real-world education of medical students – studying for their medical degree in Holland.  Prior knowledge is a key prescription in the successive steps of the school curriculum also – we need to understand how it works and how it might be improved.

Richard Morris writes:
“I am a great believer in trying, where possible, to build on the insights of basic research to yield educational, clinical or other practical benefits.  My hope is that this exciting new project could achieve just that.”

Ingrid Bethus secures a Maitre de Conference position in Nice

Former postdoc in the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dr Ingrid Bethus, has just been successful in securing a Maitre de Conference (Lectureship) at the University of Nice in the south of France. In Edinburgh Ingrid completed experiments as part of the "schema" work of LCN and did her own project on hippocampal dopamine and memory persistence. Since leaving Edinburgh, she has been learning single-unit recording techniques with Francesca Sargolini (ex-Moser Lab) at the University of Marseilles. In the event of the weather proving a bit better in Nice than in Edinburgh, Ingrid can expect visitors from her extended family!

Worth noting is that Ingrid's position brings to a total of five recent former postdocs - Tobias Bast (Nottingham), Stephanie Daumas (Paris), Jamie Ainge (St Andrews), Ros Langston (Dundee) and Ingrid (Nice) - who have secured tenure-track positions after holding postdoc positions in LCN.

Invited Lectures

Richard Morris recently gave invited lectures on Memory Consolidation at the Friedrich-Miescher Institute in Basel, the Annual Neuroscience Day at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London; and a well-attended public lecture on Brain Mechanisms of Memory to the Carl von Siemens Foundation of Bavaria in Munich.  He will also speak at the International Conference on Memory in York and the Memory Disorders Research Society in Barcelona later in the year.

Synaptic Tagging Paper

Szu-Han Wang and Roger Redondo have just published their behavioural studies on 'synaptic tagging and capture' in PNAS. These consist of an interlinked series of electrophysiological and behavioural studies of memory revealing the positive impact of irrelevant novelty on extending the memory persistence of ostensibly inconsequential information. These studies constitute a rigorous test of a key prediction of the STC hypothesis and establish a role for VTA dopamine in the novelty-associated enhancement. The work has been picked up by various 'bloggers' notably Doug Fields writing in 'The Huffington Post' in Washington, DC.

In the news!

Some of the recent work that Roger Redondo and Richard Morris have been doing has been the subject of a feature article in a Zurich newspaper. The title is, roughly translated, "Post-it notes on neurons" and refers to the synaptic tagging and capture hypothesis of protein synthesis-dependent long-term potentiation. Their recent review and update of this theory was published in the january edition of Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2011).

Click here to see the full article.

PhD Awards

Congratulations to Cassie Hosburn, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation entitled "Investigating the Role of the Hippocampal Formation in Episodic and Spatial Memory" on 28th October 2010. Cassie's research, carried out in the Memory and Space lab with Emma Wood and Paul Dudchenko, combined careful behavioural analyses with selective neurotoxic lesioning techniques, pharmacological approaches to selectively block AMPA and NMDA-receptor mediated processes, and single unit recording techniques, to address the role of the hippocampus and postsubiculum in spatial and episodic memory. Her work produced several novel and important findings, including uncovering a role for NMDA-mediated processes in the postsubiculum in encoding object-place information, describing the roles of CA3 and CA1 subregions of the hippocampus in episodic-like memory for what-where-which information, and establishing links between hippoampal goal-sensitive neuronal activity and development of specific spatial memory strategies. Many thanks to her examiners, Dr Alexander Easton (Durham) and Dr Thomas Wolbers (CCNS, Edinburgh). We wish Cassie every success in her future career.

Aisling Spain successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled “Pathological and cognitive alterations in mouse models of traumatic brain injury and hypoperfusion” on 9th February 2011.  She works in the Horsburgh lab with Jill Fowler and Karen Horsburgh and investigated the effects of traumatic brain injury and chronic cerebral hypoperfusion on pathology and cognition, with a particular emphasis on white matter.  Aisling also looked at the potential role of white matter in the relationship between traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease.  The research found that selective damage to different elements of white matter as a result of traumatic brain injury or chronic cerebral hypoperfusion is associated with detrimental effects on cognition.  A further key finding was that following traumatic brain injury an Alzheimer’s disease related protein was deposited in white matter.  The thesis was examined by Stephen Gentleman (UCL), Debbie Dewar (Glasgow) and Colin Smith (Edinburgh).

Another CCNS Ph.D student, Dorothy Tse, successfully defended her Ph.D thesis on Friday 18 March. External examiners Prof Serge Laroche (CNRS) and Dr Clea Warburton (Bristol) commented on the imagination of her experiments and that the thesis was very well written. They also had a vigorous discussion in which lots of ideas for new research was aired. Dorothy has already published some of the work (Tse, Langston, Science, 2007; Bethus et al, J Neuroscience 2010) and another paper has recently been submitted. Congratulations Dorothy!

Au revoir to Severine Launay

Severine Launay's productive post-doctoral fellowship in Edinburgh ends in December 2010. Severine joined the Disconnected Mind-neuroproteomics team in January 2009 and is returming to France to take up a position with the biotech company "Gene Signal" in the Isle de France. The University of Edinburgh was Severine's first post doctoral position after completion of her PhD. It has been asuccessful period of research with a handful of publications published, in press or in submision. While it is sad to be losing Severine, it is gratifying that Severine had a range of career opportunities available to her even in the challenging research enviroment of today.

All her colleagues and friends in Edinburgh wish her well in her life and career, back home in France.

Models of Dementia; the good, the bad and the future

The Biochemical Society is hosting a meeting on 15-17 December 2010 in Robinson College, University of Cambridge. Full details and information are available from the Society's website.

Science is Vital: The Campaign

Public funding of science is vital to the future of the UK - so says the Government!! Following a successful campaign, the Comprehensive Spending Review has been announced and scientific research has emerged from this relatively protected compared to some other branches of public spending. If you would like to know more, please see these links - Research for our Future and a short film on YouTube . A commentary on the success of the campaign is available in the Guardian

Champalimaud Research Centre

Richard Morris (Director, cCNS) recently visited the new Champalimaud Research Centre in Lisbon on a fact-finding tour together with the sponsor (Lady Sainsbury) and architect (Ian Ritchie) of the forthcoming Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London. The attached photos show (1) the visiting group with Director of Neuroscience, Dr Zach Meinen and (2) Ian Ritchie together with architects from Charles Correa Associates of Mumbai who designed the Centre in Lisbon. It is an astonishing new building with a site only to be dreamed of beside the Tagus River located at the very docks from which Vasco de Gama set off on his explorations of the world in the 16thC. The "Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown" was opened by the President of Portugal on 5 October 2010.

Honoured Friends

Members of cCNS will be pleased to hear that Dr Mort Mishkin, of NIMH, who opened our Centre in May 2007 has just been awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama. This is the highest honour awarded to working scientists in the United States. The photo shows Mort cutting the ribbon of the new behavioural neuroscience labs with Professor John Aggleton (Cardiff University).

Caledonian Fellowship

As part of  cCNS’ programme of encouraging our best young scientists to take steps towards scientific independence within the Centre, it’s great to announce that Dr. Szu-Han Wang (a postdoc in Richard Morris’ group) has been successful in securing a Caledonian Fellowship.  Her project will be on behavioural aspects of synaptic tagging and capture – building on work that Szu-Han has recently had accepted for publication in Proc. Natl. Acad Sci., 2010. 

Congratulations to Szu-Han!

Visit by Dr. Howard Eichenbaum

cCNS has recently been privileged to have the distinguished behavioural neuroscientist, Dr. Howard Eichenbaum (Boston University) with us for 10 days for scientific discussions.  It marked the 20th Anniversary of a successful sabbatical visit that Howard spent in Richard Morris’ lab.  During this visit, Howard gave the first cCNS seminar of the academic year, to a packed lecture hall, and was then joined by Menno Witter (NTNU, Trondheim), David Diamond (University of South Florida) and Monica Muñoz (University Castilla-la-Mancha) for a workship on 8 October 2010.  Some photos of the workshop presentations can be seen here.

CCNS members attending FENS

Members of the Centre attended the recent successful Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) meeting in Amsterdam.   We presented posters in various sessions throughout the meeting, and Thomas Wolbers’ symposium on brain mechanisms of direction finding went ahead as planned – though sadly without him due to his being struck down by food poisoning the day before.  Get well Thomas!  Richard Morris, a past-President of FENS, introduced the Plenary Lecture given by Stanislas Dehearne, a scholarly talk that was one of the widely acknowledged highlights of FENS.  The atmosphere in Amsterdam was fantastic - with Holland doing so well in the World Cup.

New grant

Richard Morris has been awarded a one-year grant of £120K by the Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharmaceutical Company for ‘blue-skies’ research related to his fundamental research on memory schemes.  This is relevant to the company’s own interests in cognition and cognitive enhancement, and will enable Dr Tomonori Takeuchi to take this research forward to embrace a number of molecular techniques.

New HFSP Grant Awarded

Congratulations to Emma Wood and Paul Dudchenko who have been awarded a Program Grant from the Human Frontier Science Program entitled "Deliberative Decision-Making in Rats" together with international collaborators Dr David Redish (USA), and Prof Ichiro Tsuda and Dr Jan Lauwereyns (Japan). Deliberation decision-making refers to the transient consideration of potential consequences of one’s actions so as to determine the best choice. Rats, monkeys, and humans have all been found to deliberate over difficult decisions, particularly when faced with uncertain or newly-learned situations. However, the mechanisms by which deliberation aids in decision-making, the mechanisms by which choices are selected to be considered, and the relationship between deliberation and other categorizations of decision-making are all still unknown. The research team will be investigating these issues using a combination of neurophysiological (ensemble single unit recording), cognitive and mathematical approaches. Start date - September 1st 2010.