Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour

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Sainsbury Wellcome Centre
Established2016
Parent institution
University College London
DirectorTom Mrsic-Flogel
Location
London, United Kingdom
Website sainsburywellcome.org
SWC Logo 4C Blue CMYK.png

The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC) is a neuroscience research institute located in London, United Kingdom. The SWC is part of University College London (UCL), but sits outside of the faculty structure. [1] It is funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation [2] and Wellcome. [3]

Contents

Founded in 2016, [4] the Centre comprises 12 labs whose research feeds into the mission of understanding how the brain generates behaviour. [5] SWC is led by Director Professor Tom Mrsic-Flogel, [6] Associate Director Professor Troy Margrie, and Chief Scientific Officer Professor Tom Otis.

History and funding

Conceptualised by Lord David Sainsbury in partnership with the Wellcome Trust, SWC was officially opened on 23 May 2016 by Nobel Laureate Professor Eric Kandel. [4] SWC was established by inaugural Director and Nobel Laureate John O’Keefe [7] with funding from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation [2] and Wellcome Trust. [3]

In October 2016, Professor Tom Mrsic-Flogel was appointed as the new Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre. [6]

Building design

The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in London SWC Building Image.jpg
The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in London

The building was designed by Ian Ritchie of Ian Ritchie Architects. [8] The design of the labs and common areas was based on the feedback and observations from leading neuroscience research institutes around the world. [9] [10] The core of the building houses the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, a computational neuroscience research unit that collaborates closely with SWC. [11]

Research focus

Research at SWC is focused on systems neuroscience. SWC’s mission is to understand how neural circuits produce flexible, complex behaviours. [5] The Centre comprises 14 research groups, made up of postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, research assistants, and some Master’s students. They are led by the following experimental neuroscientists:

Researchers work closely with the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit to bridge theoretical and experimental neuroscience. [11]

Scientific accomplishments

In November 2017, a new device called Neuropixels was announced that records from hundreds of brain cells simultaneously. [12] [13] [14] SWC was involved in a collaboration to develop the Neuropixels probes with scientists at HHMI Janelia Research Campus, the Allen Institute for Brain Science and UCL, and engineers at imec. [15]

In September 2018, Professor John O’Keefe spoke at the Schrödinger at 75 conference about his lab’s work to develop simple tests of spatial awareness that could allow doctors to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. [16] [17]

In December 2020, SWC scientists developed a brain machine interface (BMI) that allowed mice to learn to guide a cursor using only their brain. This research could be applied to improve human BMIs in the future. [18]

In July 2021, SWC Group Leader Athena Akrami and the Patient Led Research Collaborative published the largest international study of Long COVID to date which identified over 200 symptoms across 10 organ systems. [19] [20] [21] [22] The researchers called for a national screening programme for those with long Covid symptoms. [23] [24] [25]

Education

The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre runs a four-year PhD programme taught by faculty at SWC, the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and affiliated institutions including UCL. [26] [27]

Governing board

SWC Governing Board is chaired by Professor Barry Everitt, other voting members are Professor Silvia Arber, Wendy Becker, Adrienne Fairhall, Peter Hesketh, Professor Tony Movshon, Professor Stephanie Schorge, Miranda Wolpert. [28]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Dayan</span>

Peter Dayan is a British neuroscientist and computer scientist who is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. He is co-author of Theoretical Neuroscience, an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian methods from machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand neural function and is particularly recognized for relating neurotransmitter levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He has pioneered the field of reinforcement learning (RL) where he helped develop the Q-learning algorithm, and made contributions to unsupervised learning, including the wake-sleep algorithm for neural networks and the Helmholtz machine.

The Gatsby Charitable Foundation is an endowed grant-making trust, based in London, founded by David Sainsbury in 1967. The organisation is one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, set up to provide funding for charitable causes. Although the organisation is permitted in its Trust Deed to make general grants within this broad area, its activities have been restricted to a limited number of fields. At the time of writing, these fields are:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging</span> Laboratory of the University College London

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moser research environment</span>

The Moser research environment is the informal name of a research environment established and led by the Nobel laureates Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. The Mosers joined the university as professors of psychology in 1996, and formed their own neuroscience research group. The research group eventually evolved into several projects and research centers. The Mosers were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain."

UCL Neuroscience is a research domain that encompasses the breadth of neuroscience research activity across University College London's (UCL) School of Life and Medical Sciences. The domain was established in January 2008, to coordinate neuroscience activity across the many UCL departments and institutes in which neuroscience research takes place. In 2014, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the UCL neuroscientist John O'Keefe. In two consecutive years 2017 and 2018, the Brain Prize, the world's most valuable prize for brain research at €1m, was awarded to UCL neuroscientists Peter Dayan, Ray Dolan, John Hardy, and Bart De Strooper.

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May-Britt Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She and her then-husband, Edvard Moser, shared half of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for work concerning the grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, as well as several additional space-representing cell types in the same circuit that make up the positioning system in the brain. Together with Edvard Moser she established the Moser research environment at NTNU, which they lead. Since 2012 she has headed the Centre for Neural Computation.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eleanor Maguire</span> Irish neuroscientist (born 1970)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">John O'Keefe (neuroscientist)</span> American–British neuroscientist

John O'Keefe, is an American-British neuroscientist, psychologist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser; he has received several other awards. He has worked at University College London for his entire career, but also held a part-time chair at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at the behest of his Norwegian collaborators, the Mosers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Hausser</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences</span>

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Dora Angelaki is a Professor of Neuroscience in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. She previously held the Wilhelmina Robertson Professorship of Neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine. She looks at multi-sensory information flow between subcortical and cortical areas of the brain. Her research interests include spatial navigation and decision-making circuits. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

Catherine J. "Cathy" Price is a British neuroscientist and academic. She is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.

Claudia Clopath is a Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Imperial College London and research leader at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. She develops mathematical models to predict synaptic plasticity for both medical applications and the design of human-like machines.

Hugo Critchley is a British professor of psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, a partnership of the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex.

Neuropixels probes are electrodes developed in 2017 to record the activity of hundreds of neurons in the brain. The probes are based on CMOS technology and have 1,000 recording sites arranged in two rows on a thin, 1-cm long shank.

Sonja Hofer is a German neuroscientist studying the neural basis of sensory perception and sensory-guided decision-making at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. Her research focuses on how the brain processes visual information, how neural networks are shaped by experience and learning, and how they integrate visual signals with other information in order to interpret the outside world and guide behaviour. She received her undergraduate degree from the Technical University of Munich, her PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, and completed a post doctorate at the University College London. After holding an Assistant Professorship at the Biozentrum University of Basel in Switzerland for five years, she now is a group leader and Professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour since 2018.

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