About
We are a computational neuroscience research group, split between Ulster University in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and University of Bristol in Bristol, in south-west England.
Research
We work on three main areas: Learning & Memory, Autism, and Statistical methods for neural data.
Learning and Memory
- Heterosynaptic plasticity: how do neighboring synapses on a dendrite influence each other? Work by Sofia and James Mc.
- What are the mechanisms and rules of synaptic plasticity? Work by Cian.
- What are the rules by which mitochondria get trafficked in long axons? Work by Naomi.
- How can synapses learn probabilistically and energy-efficiently? Work by James Malkin.
- How do synapses remain stable in the face of stochastic gene expression? Work by Oleg.
Statistical methods for neural data
How should we analyse data from large numbers of neurons? We work on statistical methods for analysing large-scale neural datasets, including: deep neural networks, probabilistic models of neural population activity distributions, and bayesian hierarchal modelling.
Work by Sydney, Kipp and Cian.
Autism
What is different in the brains of autistic people? We collaborate with researchers who work on animal models of autism to ask what is different at the level of neural circuits. Currently we are working on the neural variability hypothesis: that the brains of autistic people respond with more variability to sensory stimuli. Also asking how computational modelling can inform neural circuit-level understanding of autism mechanisms.
Work by Cian.