Andrew Sharott is a Professor of Neuroscience at the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit, and leads the Sharott Group. We spoke to him ahead of his Departmental Seminar.
Tell us a little about yourself, and what attracted you to working at the University of Oxford?
Before coming to Oxford I was a post-doc in Hamburg, where I was working to understand which electrophysiological signals were associated with Parkinsonian symptoms using recordings from people undergoing functional neurosurgery. I came here for a second post-doc to work with Pete Magill on the same question, but at the level of specific neuron types across the basal ganglia using a rodent model of the disease.
How did you get to where you are today? Can you tell us more about your career path?
Throughout my career as a PhD student and post-doc, I tried to maintain parallel human and preclinical investigations into the pathophysiology of movement disorders. I got a big slice of luck when Peter Brown became director of the Brain Network Dynamics Unit, as this aligned well with his vision and gave me the chance to start my own group.
Can you give us a brief overview of your research?
Our first aim is to understand how the co-ordination of neuronal activity, within and across neural circuits, underpins cognition and movement. To achieve this, we record 100s-1000s of neurons across the forebrain in rodents, then use a variety of analytical approaches to find the neural correlates of specific motor and cognitive aspects of behaviour. Our second aim is to utilise that understanding to drive novel therapeutics for brain disorders, particularly deep brain stimulation. To do this we use closed-loop approaches, whereby we develop algorithms to track a specific aspect of neural activity in real-time and use it to control the timing of stimulation back into our target system. By combing these approaches, we aim to find more precise ways of manipulating neural dynamics associated with specific behaviours and/or brain disorders.
What is the aim/vision for your research?
Our overarching aim is to combine closed-loop stimulation approaches tailored to behavioural states (sleep, movement, symptom expression etc), with the goal of targeting different symptoms in the same individual to provide more effective and comprehensive therapy.
What can we expect from your Departmental Seminar?
I will present series of preclinical and clinical studies from my group that demonstrate the therapeutic potential of closed-loop stimulation and how this led to our current focus on memory.
What key question are you trying to answer in your Departmental Seminar?
Can closed-loop deep brain stimulation provide an effective, clinically tractable approach to improve impaired memory in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease?