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.