Michael Lohse

Michael is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow in Tom Mrsic-Flogel’s lab at SWC, and collaborates (co-sponsors) with Christian Machens at Champalimaud (Portugal) and Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University (USA). He studies how representations of relevant sensory evidence are selected and transformed as it flows across the brain to guide actions, and how these transformations are gated by cognitive processes, like attention, to select appropriate representations in different contexts.

Michael completed his PhD (funded by a Wellcome Trust 4-year doctoral studentship) in Andrew King’s lab at University of Oxford. There he studied how sensory context is implemented in mouse auditory subcortical circuits. His PhD work demonstrated that somatosensation controls the excitability of the auditory thalamus via direct and indirect projections from primary somatosensory cortex (Lohse et al., 2021, Nat. Comm.). He also showed that auditory contrast gain control is largely implemented in the auditory midbrain and thalamus independent of auditory cortical input (Lohse et al., 2020, Nat. Comm.).