Oliver Gauld

Oli is a research fellow in the Duan lab and is interested in the neural circuits involved in flexible and value-based decision-making. After completing his undergraduate studies in Neuroscience at Edinburgh University, and working as a research assistant at Oxford University, he joined UCL in 2014 for a PhD in Michael Hausser’s neural computation lab. During this time, Oli developed a project that combined behavioural psychophysics, population calcium imaging and targeted optogenetic manipulations to study the neural codes underlying whisker sensation in somatosensory cortex. At the SWC, he will help develop behavioural tasks to study value-based decision making in head-fixed mice, and will perform recording and perturbation experiments to identify and probe the neural circuit mechanisms involved in ‘risky’ decision-making.