Julia Harris

Julia Harris joined the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour in 2024. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Oxford University, and then joined UCL’s 4 Year Wellcome PhD in Neuroscience, where she studied brain energetics with David Attwell, using a combined theoretical and experimental approach.

In 2014, she was awarded an Imperial Junior Research Fellowship to work between Bill Wisden’s lab at Imperial and Denis Burdakov’s lab at the Francis Crick Institute, switching to the in vivo study of sleep. She then joined Andreas Schaefer’s lab at the Crick, where she worked with automated behaviour settings and large-scale electrophysiology within the olfactory system.

Julia is now combining her experience in brain energetics, sleep, behaviour and olfaction to study circuit reorganisation during sleep, from synaptic to population-level changes. Her lab is interested in the role that sleep plays in managing computational and energetic requirements that are crucial for survival.