Neural Development, Plasticity and Repair
Research Achievements
Each academic member of the group is an internationally recognised expert in their field.
- Tom Strachan and Steve Robson jointly lead a national bank in human embryos.
- Susan Lindsay and Tom Strachan are joint leaders of pioneering work to create a 3-dimensional reconstruction of genetic expression in the developing embryonic brain.
- Steve Robson has research interests in fetal ultrasonography and brain development.
- Janet Eyre leads the only group internationally able to carry out detailed neurophysiological studies of the motor system in preterm babies and young infants.
- Gary Green is an expert in how the auditory system analyses sounds and in non invasive functional imaging.
- Gavin Clowry is becoming internationally recognised for seminal studies of spinal cord plasticity, which are now being quoted in reviews in Nature Neuroscience.
- Clarke Slater leads one of only two groups in the UK studying the microneurophysiology of the neuromuscular junction.
- Allan Colver leads the largest register for cerebral palsy in the UK and is currently bringing together all the registers in Europe to create an unparalleled research resource for identifying informative subjects or for their follow-up after intervention studies.
We are the only group internationally able to bring together such a diversity of skills to address the development of the motor system and its plastic response to lesions/interventions during development.
Research Strategy
- Visuomotor and auditory-motor links are essential in movement control and for the development of speech. We are currently performing pilot studies with a view to a joint programme grant to map non-invasively in human preterm babies and infants the functional development of these cortical networks and the response to early lesions.
- To expand our expertise in functioning networks we have sponsored an application for a Wellcome Senior Fellowship for Stewart Baker to join our research group from Cambridge
- Our longer term strategy is to develop interventions to either repair perinatal lesions and/or to shape subsequent development during critical periods of plasticity. As a first step towards repair we are planning a showcase application to study in a rat model the use of stem cells to repair periventricular leucomalaecia in preterm babies. We are also studying how Botulinum toxin may be used to shape motor system development.
Further information about this area of research can be found at
the Institute of Genetic Medicine and Institute of Neuroscience
Staff List
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