Interests:

Cognitive dysfunction in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia arise from changes to neuronal networks. For example, in late-stage AD, there is substantial neurodegeneration which alters the integrity of the surviving network. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that more subtle changes to synaptic circuits may underlie the cognitive deficits that occur earlier on in the disease, prior to detectable neuronal loss.

Dr Brown and his colleagues aim to characterize these changes in neuronal networks at multiple levels of complexity, using mouse models of dementia and schizophrenia. They make whole-cell recordings from neurons in brain areas known to be affected in these diseases, such as the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex and prefrontal cortex. They use these approaches to explore the synaptic and intrinsic properties of these neurons. More recently they have been using recording techniques that allow them to record network activity from multiple brain regions simultaneously, to explore the impact of cellular level changes on larger scale network interactions.