Dr. Emilie Syed joins the Unit as a visiting scientist to advance a collaborative project between the Magill group and those of Prof. Peter Brown and Dr. Mark Walton at the University of Oxford. Emilie’s research in the Unit has the broad aim of defining how dopamine release dynamics correlate with striatal population activities during behaviour. To achieve this, Emilie is combining chronic electrophysiology and voltammetry techniques.
Emilie graduated from King’s College London in 2001 with a B.Sc. in Pharmacology. She has a long-standing interest in the basal ganglia since she undertook her first research project in Prof. Peter Jenner’s Neurodegeneration Research Group, studying the morphological changes in dopaminergic terminals in striatum in Parkinson’s disease. In 2004, she obtained her Ph.D. in Natural Sciences in Prof. Andreas Engel’s Research Unit at Hamburg University, where she studied functional connectivity between sensory areas of cortex, striatum and thalamus. Emilie joins us now from the Université Bordeaux 2 where she worked on the pathophysiological role of oscillatory activity in the subthalamic nucleus in Parkinson’s disease with Dr. Abdelhamid Benazzouz and Dr. Thomas Boraud.