Tara Keck | |
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Born | Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S. | November 26, 1978
Alma mater | Harvard University Boston University |
Known for | Synaptic plasticity in vivo |
Scientific career | |
Fields |
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Institutions | Professor of Neuroscience at University College London |
Website | iris.ucl.ac.uk |
Tara Keck (born November 26, 1978, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina) is an American-British neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, at University College London working in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology. She is the Vice-Dean International for the Faculty of Life Sciences. [1] [2] She studies experience-dependent synaptic plasticity, its effect on behaviour [3] and how it changes during ageing and age-related diseases. [4] She has worked in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund on approaches for healthy ageing. [5] [6] Her recent work has focused on loneliness in older people, with a focus on gender. [7] [8] [9] [10] She was named a UNFPA Generations and Gender Fellow in 2022. [11]
Professor Keck attended Harvard University from 1997 to 2001, majoring in bioengineering and then earned a PhD in biomedical engineering from Boston University in 2005, working with John White. [12] She grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania and attended Fairview High School. [13]
Professor Keck completed her postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich, Germany with Tobias Bonhoeffer and Mark Hübener. [14] She received an MRC Career Development Fellowship from the Medical Research Council (United Kingdom) in 2010 [15] and subsequently started her own lab at King's College London in the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology. [16] In 2014, she moved her lab to University College London. [17] In 2018, she was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. [18] Professor Keck's work focuses on different forms of synaptic plasticity in the intact brain, with a focus on homeostatic plasticity and changes in plasticity during ageing and age-related diseases. [4] Her work has demonstrated that homeostatic mechanisms in vivo may be implemented at a network level, rather than a single cell level. [19] [20] [21] [22] She is a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and the Wekerle Foundation Award [23] , and was a finalist for the Max Planck Society Neuroscience Research Award.