Dr Matthias Hennig wins 5-year MRC Career Development Fellowship

The Medical Research Council (MRC) career development award provides up to five years' support for outstanding post-doctoral researchers who wish to consolidate their research skills and make the transition from post-doctoral research trainee to independent investigator.

Dr Matthias Hennig has been awarded £556k to carry out research on regulation of electrical activity (homeostasis) in developing neural circuits. He will use computational and mathematical tools to investigate the complex, experimentally often challenging, interactions between neural activity and regulatory cellular mechanisms during brain development. We expect that this will not only lead to a better understanding of these processes in the healthy brain, but also provide us with clues about the origin and cause of a range of developmental pathologies.

'I hope I can create some sustainable new links between research in neuroinformatics and systems biology. For me, this is a really exciting new research area and IANC is the perfect place to do this kind of work. I received exceptional support from many people in the institute. In particular, I wish to thank Mark van Rossum for supporting my application to MRC.'

Dr Hennig is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation (IANC) where he works closely with Mark van Rossum and David Willshaw on computational modelling of neural development and activity.

A summary of the project is below.

Project summary

Nervous system development is a complicated process of growth, specialisation and refinement. Once neurons have formed connections, intrinsically generated spontaneous electrical activity has a critical role of controlling and maintaining the stability of immature neural circuits. If this regulation fails, circuits can not develop properly, and neurological disorders such as epilepsy can develop as a result. Currently, we are only beginning to understand these regulatory processes. A challenge for this research is that often multiple cellular mechanism act simultaneously, resulting in complicated mutual interactions between neural physiology and circuits. In this project, state of the art computational and mathematical modelling will be used to address these questions. Models of neural circuits and regulatory processes will be combined to interpret experimental results and to develop novel, experimentally testable hypotheses. These methods will also be used to study the regulation of neural activity in the developing retina, an important model system for neural development and neurodegenerative disorders. This project will therefore not only advance our basic understanding of regulation of neural activity during development, but also help to understand the origins of developmental and degenerative neurological disorders. Additionally, computational models can help to reduce the number of animals required for research.

This is an interdisciplinary project co-hosted by the School of Informatics and the Centre for Systems Biology.

related Links

Matthias Hennig Homepage
MRC Career Development Award
The Centre for Systems Biology