Research
I am an Academic Clinical Lecturer in Neurology, and Official Fellow of Murray Edwards College, where I teach neuroscience and direct studies for psychology.
My research has two overarching aims:
1) to employ systems neuroscience as a translational bridge between the molecular biology of dementia and targeted clinical trials.
2) to define perceptual mechanisms, neural codes and brain substrates, and how they go wrong in patients with neurological pathology.
I am particularly interested in how brain mechanisms for prediction, language and learning become abnormal in patients with the aphasic forms of frontotemporal dementia. These are ideal demonstrator conditions, because of their stereotyped patterns of neurodegeneration, the psychophysical precision of language as a probe, and the fragility of human language networks to synaptic disruption.
My research uses a variety of techniques, including psychophysics, PET, magnetoencephalography and ultra-high field (7T) functional MRI.
