Brain development and evolution

Fields:

Anaesthesiology
Biomedical engineering
Biostatistics
Cerebral palsy
Data analytics
Genomics
Intellectual disability
Medical image analysis
Mental health
Neuroscience
Obstetrics
Perinatal research
Pharmacology
Psychiatry
Radiology and imaging

Location: School of Biomedical Sciences (St Lucia)

Type of student:

Both HDR and Extra-curricular
4 Unit Masters of Public Health (MPH) Student

Type of work:

Literature review
Qualitative methods
Secondary data analysis
Statistical analysis
Systematic review
Wet lab work

Brief synopsis:

How complex brain circuits form and mature during life, as well as their functional relevance both in health and disease remain topics of intense neuroscience investigation. Moreover, an understanding of how neural circuits arose during animal evolution is required to understand mental health in humans, as well as to get a deeper understanding of what usually goes wrong (and why) in cases of neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism or schizophrenia. Our groups study these questions using a range of methods of comparative neuroscience in mice and a mouse-sized marsupial (the fat-tailed dunnart) that includes developmental neuroanatomy, molecular specification of cortical circuits, gene manipulation in vivo, transcriptomics and bioinformatics, advanced microscopy and MRI circuit mapping, calcium imaging of neural activity, systems and network biology, and animal behaviour (developmental and adult). Possible involvement includes literature reviews of state-of-the-art concepts in these fields, microscopy image analysis, computational analyses at several levels of expertise (programming skills in R or Python are a plus), and brain/body microsurgery in small animals (adults and very small developing joeys). Wetlab work in neuroanatomy, molecular neurobiology, and in vivo brain imaging is possible depending on time and project-alignment constraints. Shorter- or longer-term projects can be discussed on a case-to-case basis according to needs and skills and can accommodate interests on fundamental research and potential applications to humans.

Prerequisite skills:

Outstanding critical thinking; interest in fundamental research; some experience in two or more of: