Credibility Across Sectors: Careers, Culture & Collaboration in Neuroscience

Michael Ashby

Associate Professor in Neuroscience, University of Bristol

Research in the Ashby lab investigates plasticity of the brain, focussing on early life development of synaptic and neuronal circuit function and on how abnormal synaptic biology contributes to neurodegenerative disease.

Using cutting edge fluorescence imaging and photostimulation approaches in mouse and human brain slices and in vivo in mouse models, we have contributed to understanding of emerging synapses in the developing brain and how synaptic turnover shapes ongoing changes in neuronal connectivity. Specific examples include using 2-photon calcium imaging in mouse brain slices to show novel modes of dendritic signalling during synaptic plasticity and in vivo imaging of disruptions to structural synaptic plasticity and neuronal activity in mouse models of neurodegenerative tauopathy. 

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John Huxter

Associate Director & Cognition Lead , Transpharmation Ltd

John Huxter is Associate Director and Cognition Lead at Transpharmation. John has had more than 25 years of neuroscience experience in both academia and industry, and across diverse therapeutic areas including psychiatric disorders, chronic pain, and neurodegeneration. With a background in both behaviour and electrophysiology (UCL, University of Bristol, Oxford’s MRC Analytical Neuropharmacology Unit), he has led biomarker discovery and assay development efforts at both Pfizer and Eli Lilly before joining Transpharmation in 2020. John is passionate about the translational potential for preclinical neuroscience, and works closely with the Transpharmation teams in the UK, Ireland, Poland and Canada to explore new opportunities for drug discovery and collaboration.

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Steven J. West

Head of Histology, Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

No bio provided

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Johanna Jackson

Advanced Research Fellow, Imperial College London

Jo Jackson is an Advanced Research Fellow, Alzheimer's Society Dementia Research Leader, the first recipient of the Alzheimer's Society's Carol Jennings Fellowship and a UK DRI Emerging Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute centre at Imperial. Her group takes a multi-‘omic and imaging approach to provide a mechanistic insight into the vulnerability of synaptic components in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). This enables her group to identify and test molecular targets to achieve the vision of therapeutically targeting the synapse in AD.

Dr Jackson completed her PhD at Imperial College and post docs at Lund University and Imperial. She gained extensive experience studying synaptic integration in models of axonal injury and epilepsy. She then joined Eli Lilly where she established an in vivo two-photon imaging platform to characterise synaptic changes and other disease processes in pre-clinical models of AD. Her group was the first to simultaneously image both pre- and post-synaptic components as the pathology prgresses. At Lilly, she co-chaired their Neuroplasticity Drug Discovery platform and proposed ways to therapeutically target the synapse in AD.

Since returning to Imperial, Dr Jackson has led the UK DRI Multi-‘omics Atlas Project; an open resource mapping the cellular pathology of AD. This project has involved establishing a comprehensive multi-'omic atlas characterising the pathology of human Alzheimer's Disease and in cohorts with genetic risk variants. More information can be found at map-ad.org.

Her current work aims to investigate selective vulnerability of pre- vs post-synaptic components and to understand mechanisms of their vulnerability such as protein synthesis or degradation. This will be used to determine the impact of repurposed drugs on these vulnerabilities and finally to validate biomarkers to track synaptic changes through disease or to determine drug efficacy. This allows her group to understand the mechanisms of synaptopathy and, as the loss of synapses closely correlates with cognitive decline in AD, start to develop a synapse-targeting treatment for therapeutic benefit.

Her work is supported by the Hamilton Neal Fund, the Alzheimer's Society, the Brightfocus Foundation, the Rosetrees Trust and the UK Dementia Research Institue which is principally funded by the Medical Research Council.

Dr Jackson is also the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Lead for the Department of Brain Sciences.

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Georgina MacKenzie

Research Lead, Wellcome Trust

Georgina MacKenzie, a Research Lead at the Wellcome Trust, has expertise in open science and large-scale international collaborations, as demonstrated by her involvement with the International Brain Laboratory (IBL).

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Marcus Munafò

Executive Director, The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN)

Marcus Munafò is Deputy Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of Bath. He has a long-standing interest in meta-research, and the organisational factors, incentive structures and working practices that shape researcher behaviour and research quality.

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Tatiana Rosenstock

Principal Scientist, Sygnature Discovery

Tatiana Rosenstock has had an exceptional career and has made significant contributions to the field of Neuroscience for 20+ years. Her work has focused on topics such as mitochondrial deregulation, transcription deregulation, and autophagy in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Huntington’s Disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and Schizophrenia.  

At Sygnature Discovery, Tatiana is a Principal Scientist overseeing various neuroscience-related projects in different sub-areas such as metabolism (mitochondrial function), biomarkers, microglial function and activation, and neuroplasticity. During this period, she has been working with distinct in-vitro models, named iPSC-derived neurons, primary cortical neurons, Alzheimer`s and Parkinson`s disease fibroblasts, neuroblastomas cell lines, tissue and biofluids from transgenics animal models of Alzheimer`s disease. 

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Adam Tyson

Head Research Engineer, Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Adam Tyson is Head Research Engineer and Head of the Neuroinformatics Unit at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit.

He is interested in the development of open-source and easy to use software for neuroscience, particularly image analysis. Adam is the co-founder and lead of the development of the BrainGlobe Initiative.

Previously he was Scientific Software Lead at the Institute of Cancer Research and Research Fellow in the Margrie Lab. Adam carried out his PhD at King’s College London in the Andreae Lab.

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Emily Wheater

Research manager, Wellcome Trust

No bio provided

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