Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Sir Henry Dale Fellow
- Wolfson Inst for Biomedical Research
- Div of Medicine
- Faculty of Medical Sciences
I am a Wellcome Trust & Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow at UCL. I held a EC Marie Curie Fellowship from 2013 to 2016 in Clifford Woolf's lab at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Prior to this I was worked with R. Alan North FRS at the University of Manchester. A strong interest in neuroscience developed while working with Peter Stanfield at Warwick.




Our goal is to understand how the brain adapts protective behaviours and pain.
Pain
alerts us to the threat of damage; it is protective and essential for
survival. However, injury or pathology can affect this system leading to
ongoing debilitating pain that is non-protective and without benefit.
This represents a huge unmet clinical need.
Our research team is investigating how the cortex and midbrain process sensory information and generate appropriate protective behaviours and pain. We take a highly multidisciplinary approach
and build optical systems to study the neural basis of these behaviours
in mice. We use two-photon calcium imaging, machine vision,
optogenetics, electrophysiology, computational approaches, and viral and
transgenic methods to address key questions.
We have revealed
how noxious stimuli are encoded rapidly by primary afferent neurons to
improve the chances of an organism's survival. We are now investigating
how this sensory information is processed by downstream circuits to
generate rapid yet appropriate behaviours. The aim is to provide an
understanding of how these mechanisms are transformed in chronic pain, which affects up to 20% of the population.
JUN-2016 | Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellow | Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research | UCL, United Kingdom |
JUN-2013 – JUN-2015 | Marie Curie Fellow | Department of Neurobiology | Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, United States |
FEB-2009 – JUN-2013 | Postdoctoral Research Associate | Faculty of Life Sciences | University of Manchester, United Kingdom |