TCD Neuroscientist Awarded Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship

Posted on: 17 April 2013

TCD neuroscientist Dr Marian Tsanov has been awarded the prestigious Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship.

This fellowship provides an opportunity for postdoctoral scientists from across the remits of the Trust’s funding streams to become independent research scientists and undertake high-quality research.

Based in Trinity College’s Institute of Neuroscience, Dr Tsanov’s research will focus on the interactions between two memory systems. Damage to one of them can cause anterograde amnesia, the inability to learn and retrieve new events, while the impairment of the other induces the inability to learn and perform motor habits (as may happen in Parkinson’s disease).

Dr Tsanov’s discovery that the system responsible for learning of new events (hippocampus), processes information from the system responsible for motion (striatum), suggests that motor information plays important role in memory formation.

Using a combination of anatomical, electrophysiological, behavioural and novel optogenetic methods he will investigate whether neurons in structures located between hippocampus and striatum encode motor information within their firing and oscillation rates.

In collaboration with Prof Edward Boyden from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, his work will use optogenetic tools to explore the signal propagation in the context of motion. Optogenetic techniques allow the investigation of the roles of differing neuronal subtypes in behavioural contexts. Concurrent collaboration with Prof Richard Reilly from Trinity Centre for Bioengineering will help to decode the signal processing between striatal and hippocampal systems. Computational approach will elucidate the information content of neuronal spiking patterns.

Dr Tsanov said, “Treating memory impairments in various neurological conditions depends crucially on our fundamental knowledge of how information is stored by the brain. Understanding links between signal processing and the physiological mnemonic functions of neural networks will also enable us to provide pivotal biological input to the realisation of neuronal prosthetics.”