Jeffrey Gray Behavioural Neuroscience Centre Opening Event

Registration and Information

It is vital that all prospective attendees register before June 7^th 2013

Please email the BNU facility manager BNU@psy.ox.ac.uk  to confirm your attendance

On the afternoon of Friday June 21^st there will be an event to mark the opening of the Jeffrey Gray Behavioural Neuroscience Centre. Behavioural neuroscience is the study of how the brain underlies our cognition and behaviour. It involves identifying the psychological processes that underpin different behavioural and emotional states, the brain regions involved, the cell types and the neurotransmitters that allow cells to communicate with each other. This is important for understanding how the normal brain works to support cognition, emotion and sensorimotor function. But it is also vital if we are to understand how and why things go wrong in the brain in various different neurological and psychiatric disorders. The opening event will be hosted by Professors David Bannerman and Nick Rawlins (Experimental Psychology) and will include talks which illustrate how behavioural neuroscience in Oxford is helping us to understand not only how the normal brain works but also what might be happening in disorders including anxiety, schizophrenia and Parkinson’s Disease. The event will also provide an opportunity to find out what is available in the facility and how it might help answer your research questions.

 The Speakers

Prof Paul Harrison will explain how mouse models are an integral part of the efforts to understand the genetic basis of psychosis, and the important insights they have contributed.  Equally, the field has a number of conceptual and practical complexities. His talk will briefly introduce these issues, illustrated with data from recent studies conducted in Oxford.

Over the last five years Prof Jonathan Flint has led a consortium of researchers to collect in China samples suitable for a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of major depression. Over the years his research group has conducted large scale studies in rodents to tease out certain behavioural phenotypes of genes implicated in anxiety and major depression. With genetic data now in hand, there is a remarkable opportunity to understand the origins of the commonest psychiatric disease.

Dr Mark Walton will discuss work he has been involved in over the years looking at the neural circuitry involved in cost-benefit decisions and particularly using voltammetry to track dopamine during decision making.  He will also touch on how this work dovetails with ongoing studies in monkeys and where this work will be taken in the future.

Dr Richard Wade-Martins heads the Oxford Parkinson's Disease Centre. His laboratory has long had an interest in developing novel transgenic mouse and rat models of PD. The unique interdisciplinary environment of the OPDC allows his research group  to perform deep phenotyping studies of rodent models of disease, integrating findings molecular neuropathology, neuropharmacology, electrophysiology and behaviour to establish a better understanding of the earliest pathways to disease pathology in a therapeutically-tractable window

Finally we are delighted to host a plenary guest speaker, Professor Peter Dayan, head of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London. One of Jeffrey Gray's many contributions concerned neural systems involved in behavioural inhibition and activation. Prof Dayan will discuss his research group’s recent studies of these two domains in instrumental and Pavlovian control, investigating how the latter can corrupt the former in appetitive and aversive contexts.

The Jeffrey Gray Behavioural Neuroscience Centre

This new interdisciplinary research centre is named after the late Professor Jeffrey Gray, who was one of the founders of behavioural neuroscience in Oxford. It is based in a brand new state of the art laboratory for rodent testing funded by the Wellcome Trust. The facility is managed by the Department of Experimental Psychology with significant involvement from, and collaborative work with, a number of other departments including Physiology Anatomy and Genetics, Psychiatry, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Pharmacology and Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences.

It is vital that all prospective attendees register before June 7^th 2013

Please email the BNU facility manager BNU@psy.ox.ac.uk  to confirm your attendance