Nolan Lab

Hi, I’m a postdoc in the lab looking at spatial behaviours in rodents during open field exploration and goal-direction navigation task in virtual reality. More broadly, I am interested in how the brain forges meaningful representations of the physical world to guide meaningful actions in the world. I use techniques such as tetrode, silicon probe and NeuroPixel recording in mice with the aim of recording from many neurons at the same time to observe population-level neural codes.

I’m Chris Halcrow, a research software engingeer with a background in maths and physics. Generally, I’m interested in good software practices in science: openly publishing data, making sure that calculations are reproducible, and that code is transparent and easy to understand. In this lab, I focus on software called SpikeInterface which implements “spike sorting”. This is where you take a recorded electrical signal from the brain and try and decipher when, and which, neurons have fired during the recording.

I am a computer scientist from Brussels, currently researching AI in biomedical contexts, as part of the 2022 cohort of the UKRI CDT in Biomedical AI. Coming from a computational background, I entered neuroscience with an interest in how our brains compute.

I spend most of my time analysing the lab’s electrophysiology recordings, applying a variety of statistical and machine learning tools to try to get insight into what is happening. The entorhinal cortex is a great site for this type of research, as it contains a bunch of neurons that seem to correlate with spatial variables. However, we have not yet managed to combine these functional neuron types into a model that can perform the computations needed for our spatial behaviour. My project aims at (1) finding out whether this building block approach even makes sense and (2) devising and verifying alternative models for spatial computation that are a potential better fit for the circular, dynamic nature of the brain.

I am a joint PhD student in the Nolan lab and the Osterweil lab, my research focuses on understanding the development of audiogenic (or sound-induced) seizures in the Fmr1 knockout mouse, which mimics the symptoms of patients with Fragile X Syndrome. High-intensity sound stimulation makes these mice experience tonic-clonic seizures, which has been linked with neuronal hyperactivation in the dorsal nucleus of their Inferior Colliculus, a major relay station for audiogenic information.

My project involves using RNA Seq and proteomic approaches, as well as imaging and patch clamp electrophysiology to identify the cell types of these hyperactivated neurons, as well as their recruitment dynamics and intracellular electrical properties that lead to audiogenic seizure. Ultimately, we want to asses the effectiveness of various drug and gene therapies on the observed neuronal hyperactivation and the behavioural manifestation of the seizures.