CURRICULUM VITAE
Summary
I am currently a research fellow at University College London researching the neural basis of schizophrenia and epilepsy and testing the efficacy of a novel gene therapy. I was previously a postdoctoral fellow researching the neural circuits underlying hallucinations and ketamine-induced psychosis at the Francis Crick Institute in London. I completed my PhD in Neuroscience and Mental Health at University College London. In my career so far, I have developed an advanced skill set in the fields of experimental systems neuroscience and computational modelling. Research has given me the opportunity to challenge myself and learn how to ask questions, solve problems, think on my feet, and communicate my findings to outside audiences. Most importantly, I've loved working with diverse teams while also maintaining independence through my own work.
Mental health remains one of the least understood aspects of who we are and how we understand the world around us. I'm interested in leading and supporting neuroscientific research that aims to understand and develop better therapies for psychiatric symptoms, which occur in mental health disorders as well as in prodromal phases or in combination with other conditions such as in neurodegenerative, neurological, immune, or metabolic disorders.
Research Interests
Our brains are responsible for our understanding of and interaction with the world around us. I am interested in how populations of neurons act in circuits to create our perception and behaviour in order to respond to the external world.
In neuroscience, we aim to understand how the brain works. Part of understanding how the brain works is understanding what happens when it doesn't work optimally. For example, brain trauma, neurodevelopmental disorders, and neurodegenerative disease can tell us a lot about what is necessary for a brain to function well. The final frontier is mental disorders: these are defined by behavioural symptoms because we don't yet understand the neural circuits involved. By researching how neural circuits enact computations and behaviour, we can begin to unpick the mechanisms that make our brains work, and what makes us think the way that we think. This understanding is what will allow us to develop life-changing therapies for people with mental health disorders.
In my current role, I am researching the aberrant neuronal activity in schizophrenia and epilepsy, as well as testing the efficacy of a novel gene therapy in correcting this activity. I use dual-colour Miniscope imaging and Neuropixels recording to measure neuronal activity during behaviour. I work in collaboration with neuroscientists that specialise in electrophysiology and gene therapy to treat epilepsy.
In my postdoctoral fellowship, I investigated the neural mechanisms of hallucinations in psychosis. To do this, I used a range of systems neuroscience techniques, including behavioural analysis, dual-colour neuronal imaging, optogenetics, electrophysiology, pharmacology, and computational modelling to examine how hallucinations occur in mice and in humans. My work formed part of a team effort to understand and develop better treatments for auditory hallucinations in psychosis, in collaboration with immunologists and clinical psychiatrists investigating how autoimmune disorder may interface with the brain to produce psychotic symptoms.
In my PhD project, I investigated the role of the dopaminergic neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) during goal-directed navigation. To do this, I used calcium imaging and a Miniscope to record neural activity in the VTA in mice as they perform a navigation task in virtual reality. I found two patterns of activity: phasic and ramping. Ramping activity is a relatively novel finding and therefore is not explained by current reinforcement learning theories. I designed a Q-learning model incorporating position inference which explains both types of activity as a by-product of weighting action values by sensory and positional representations. I concluded that VTA dopaminergic neurons convey reward prediction error in both their patterns of activity, which improve the performance of goal-directed navigation (Farrell et al., 2022).