Blog

In this Q&A, SWC Seminar speaker Professor Steve Chang discusses his journey into studying the neural bases of social interaction. He shares his work developing an automated cooperation paradigm for marmosets, discovering different frequency modules for processing rewards in the brain, and more.

In the evolving landscape of neuroscience, understanding brain function in naturalistic settings has been challenging. Professor Nachum Ulanovsky sheds light on the recent breakthroughs overcoming these obstacles, focusing on his research with bats. He elaborates on his team’s discovery of how the hippocampus codes social variables and recent experiments on an uninhabited island in Tanzania.

In his recent SWC Seminar, Dr Timothy Dunn presented a new approach for multi-animal 3D tracking and social behaviour analysis in rats. In this Q&A, Dr Dunn explains how his new approach differs from previous tools and the implications of 3D tracking on understanding autism and Parkinson’s.

In this Q&A Dr Tessa Montague, the last 2023/24 ENSS speaker, shares insights into her fascination with cuttlefish, the challenges and triumphs of studying them, and the innovative methods employed to understand their camouflage behaviour and neural mechanisms.

How can understanding synapse pruning in development help tackle neurodegenerative disease? In a recent SWC Seminar, Professor Carla Shatz demonstrated how looking at fundamental questions in neuroscience can lead to important discoveries about diseases such as Alzheimer’s. In this Q&A, she shares more.

What we know in our heads is not always smoothly translated into how we perform. In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Kishore Kuchibhotla shared his lab’s work investigating the strategies and insights animals may use during sensorimotor learning. In this Q&A, he hints at how such findings could be implied in our own learning, his career trajectory, and how that’s informed his research direction.

How do we get to the same grocery store using different routes in the face of obstacles, such as road works? In the third ENSS talk of 2023/24, Dr Dylan Rich shared his work on understanding model-based decision-making in rats using mazes. In this Q&A, Dr Rich discusses historical roots of studying animal goal-directed behaviour, the design of experimental mazes, and the intriguing use of odour cues in learning paradigms.