Biography
Dr. Tuan Bui is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Ottawa, and a member of the Brain and Mind Research Institute and of the Centre for Neural Dynamics. Tuan has had a long-term interest in the study of motor control and the treatment of motor dysfunction due to injury or neurodegeneration. He completed his PhD in Physiology at Queen’s University in 2006. Afterwards, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Rob Brownstone at Dalhousie University where he studied spinal circuits and their involvement in hand control and locomotor activity. During his postdoctoral fellowship, Tuan received many research awards including postdoctoral fellowships from the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation and the Canadian Institute Of Health Research. He started his lab at the University of Ottawa in 2013, and has since been awarded an Ontario Early Researcher Award. Tuan has focused on studying the mechanisms by which the control of movement is refined during development by changes in spinal circuitry in fish and in mammals.
Talk Abstract
The control of movements by the nervous system is progressively refined during both embryonic and postnatal development. This refinement results in part from changes in neural circuitry across the nervous system. This is particularly true in the spinal cord where neural circuits critical for the control of muscle activity reside. Our lab has studied the maturation of specific forms of movements in mouse and fish and we have identified specific changes in spinal circuitry that underlie this maturation. These insights into how the refinement of movements arise from specific changes in spinal circuits provide a better understanding into how the nervous system controls movements in mature individuals.