Monday 8 and Tuesday 9 December 2008
Organised by Professor John Nicholls FRS and Professor Julian Paton
Professor John Nicholls FRS (Organiser)
John Nicholls (FRS, DSc, PhD, MBBS) is Professor of Neurobiology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste. He has worked at University College London, Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Stanford Universities and the Biocenter in Basel. With Stephen Kuffler, he made experiments on neuroglial cells and wrote the first edition of "From Neuron to Brain", now in its fourth edition. He has given laboratory and lecture courses in neurobiology at Woods Hole and Cold Spring Harbor, and, (on behalf of IBRO), in many universities in South and Central America, Asia and Africa. His work concerns synaptic transmission and regeneration of the nervous system after injury, which he studied first in an invertebrate, the leech, and then in immature mammalian spinal cord. Since 2004 he has made experiments to analyze neural mechanisms that give rise to the rhythm of respiration.
Professor Julian Paton (Organiser)
Julian Paton (PhD) is Professor of Physiology at the University of Bristol. He has worked at the University of London, E.I. Du Pont (USA), University of Washington (Seattle, USA) and the University of Göttingen (Germany). His work takes a multi-disciplinary approach examining central nervous system mechanisms regulating arterial pressure and breathing as well as the neuronal cross talk between the two systems particularly in disease states such as essential hypertension and sudden infant death syndrome. His work has won a number of national and international prizes and resulted in numerous plenary and public lectures worldwide.
Professor Jim Deuchars (Chair)
Jim Deuchars is Director of the Institute of Membrane and Systems Biology in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University of Leeds. As Professor of Systems Neuroscience and has initiated and co-ordinated the Neuroscience Research at Leeds (NeuR@L) initiative. Current research is funded by the BBSRC to investigate gap junctions in neurones in the brainstem and spinal cord and another project examining the neurochemistry and connections of the Intermedius Nucleus of the Medulla. Both projects are focussed on neurones with potential involvement in autonomic nervous control. Previous research has encompassed investigation of local neuronal circuitry in hippocampus, neocortex, brainstem and in collaboration with Sue Deuchars, the spinal cord.
Professor Walter St.-John (Chair)
Walter M. St.-John is presently emeritus Professor of Physiology at Dartmouth Medical School, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, New Hampshire, USA. His scientific training was at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA and Columbia University, New York, USA. He joined the Dartmouth Faculty in 1976. Extended scientific visits were conducted in the laboratories of Armand Bianchi in Marseille and Julian F.R. Paton in Bristol.
The St.-John laboratory has been concerned with brainstem mechanisms responsible for generating the various patterns of automatic breathing, especially normal breathing and gasping. Gasping is a pattern that is recruited when normal breathing fails and can serve as a powerful mechanism for autoresuscitation. The differences in activities in normal breathing and gasping of various nerves that control breathing have been characterized and the region of the brain that generates gasping has been identified. Most recently, in studies with Julian F.R. Paton, we have defined that the discharge of pacemaker neurons is responsible for generating gasping. Present studies are examining the role of various neurotransmitters in the recovery of normal breathing after a period of gasping.
Professor David Paterson (Chair)
David Paterson completed his doctoral studies in physiological sciences at Oxford in the 1980s having been a graduate of the University of Otago and the University of Western Australia. He received his Doctor of Science degree from Western Australia in 2005 and was made a Fellow of the Institute of Biology in 2003. Following an MRC post doc in Oxford and a BHF lectureship he was appointed to a University Lecturership in 1994 and made a Fellow of Merton College. He is currently Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology and Associate Head of the Department. He is Associate Head of the Division of Medical Sciences at Oxford, Chairs the editorial board of Experimental Physiology, and is a member of the national RAE 2008 panel for UoA 15.
David Paterson leads a research team in the area of cardiac neurobiology. They are interested in how both branches of the cardiac autonomic nervous system communicate at the end organ level and whether oxidative stress plays a role in uncoupling pre-synaptic and post-synaptic signalling. The endogenous gas nitric oxide is now thought to be a key intermediary in cardiac inter/intracellular signalling, where it has been shown to regulate several ion channels that control cardiac excitability. His group has developed a method for targeting the enzyme involved in making nitric oxide using a gene transfer approach involving cell-specific viral vectors to study the physiology of this messenger in normal and diseased hearts.
Professor Jean-François Brunet (Speaker)
Jean-François Brunet is principal investigator at the CNRS and Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, France. He earned his MD at the University of Toulouse (1984) and PhD (in immunology) at the University of Marseille (1988). After a postdoctoral training (in molecular neuroscience) at Columbia University in New York he embraced the field of developmental biology, first at the Institute for Developmental Biology in Marseille (1991-2001), then at the Ecole normale supérieure (2001-present). He works primarily on the ontogeny of the visceral nervous system. More recently, using genetic tools stemming from this developmental research, he has branched out into the neurophysiology and pathology of breathing, as well as the study of nervous system evolution (looking for homologies between vertebrates and invertebrate deuterostomes such as ascidians and hemichordates).
Professor Jean Champagnat (Speaker)
Jean Champagnat is a research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He has worked at the CNRS campus of Gif-sur-Yvette (France) and made experiments on respiratory-related synaptic transmission and voltage-dependent channels in vivo and in vitro. He is the director of the research unit UPR CNRS 2216 "Genetic & Integrative Neurobiology" devoted to genetic control of the circadian rhythm in Drosophila, and respiratory rhythm in chick and mice. He has been the Director of "Institut de Neurobiology Alfred Fessard" (2006-2008) which covers all Neurobiology in the Gif Campus. Since 10 years, his work concerns gene-to-function organization of the respiratory rhythm generating network, with e.g. first description of respiratory deficits resulting from the elimination of the pFRG in vivo (1996) and from the homeotic transformation of the parafacial brainstem (2001).
Professor Larry Cohen (Speaker)
Larry Cohen is a professor of Physiology at Yale University in New Haven, CT. He has developed and used optical methods for monitoring brain activity. Much of his earlier effort concerned organic voltage sensitive dyes. He has used these in monitoring activity in the Aplysia, salamander, and rat nervous systems. He was also part of the group that first used an organic calcium dye (Arsenazo III). Recently he has used calcium dyes together with both widefield and 2-photon microscopy to study the responses to odorants in the rodent olfactory bulb and to study respiratory responses in the embryonic mouse brain stem. He has given laboratory and lecture courses in neurobiology at Woods Hole and Cold Spring Harbor, and, (on behalf of IBRO), in universities in South and Central America and Asia.
Dr Mathias Dutschmann (Speaker)
Mathias Dutschmann (Dr. rer. nat.) is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Membrane and Systems Biology at the Universtity of Leeds. He has worked before at the Eberhard-Karls University, Tübingen, University of Bristol, Georg-August University of Göttingen and the University Paul Cezanne, Marseille. His scientific work is dedicated to the postnatal maturation of the ponto-medullary respiratory network in mammals. The ongoing research is focused on the postnatal emergence of synaptic plasticity associated with the processing of afferent information within the pontine aspects of respiratory network.
Professor Jaime Eugenín (Speaker)
Jaime Eugenín was born in Santiago, Chile on 1959. He received his M. D. in 1984, and his Ph.D in Biological Sciences in 1991 from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His PhD thesis work was on plasticity of ventilatory peripheral chemoreflexes, and as a NIH (Fogarty) postdoctoral fellow he studied the properties of nodose neurons co-implanted with carotid bodies at the Department of Physiology of the University of Utah School of Medicine (1989-1991). Then he was a fellow at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland, where he studied central chemoreception on isolated central nervous systems of neonatal opossum under the direction of Dr. John G. Nicholls (1993-1995). Returning to Chile in 1995, he is actually full professor of Physiology at the Department of Biology and he was the first Director of the PhD program in Biotechnology of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH).
His field of interest is the neural control of breathing to understand the biological mechanism underlying neural respiratory disorders in neonates. Specifically, he is studying the possible role of prenatal nicotine exposure as the linking factor between a well known population risk factor, the maternal cigarette smoking, and a catastrophic respiratory disorder, the sudden infant death syndrome.
Dr Gilles Fortin (Speaker)
Dr Gilles Fortin received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris-6, France. He held a postdoctoral position at the MRC Center for Developmental Neurobiology at Guy's Hospital in the laboratory of Professor Andrew Lumsden FRS. His work on the chick embryo revealed a striking relationship between early rhombomeric pattern and the ontogeny of basal rhythmogenic circuitry in the brainstem, extending the significance of hindbrain segmentation beyond modular anatomical organization to the level of network assembly and function. He has been working since at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique where he currently is a group leader in the Institut de Neurobiology Alfred Fessard in Gif sur Yvette. His present work focuses on the biological basis of the breathing behaviour using developmental genetics tools in the mouse.
Dr Richard L. Horner (Speaker)
Dr. Horner received his undergraduate degree with honours in Physiology from the University of Sheffield, UK in 1986. Dr. Horner then completed his PhD at the University of London, UK in 1991 with research investigating upper airway physiology in humans. Dr. Horner then did postdoctoral work investigating the control of breathing and sleep in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto (1991-1994) and performed further post-doctoral training in sleep and respiratory neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania (1994-1997) before returning to a faculty position at the University of Toronto. Dr. Horner is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology, and Associate Professor of Medicine and Physiology at the University of Toronto. His research uses in-vivo pre-clinical models to determine: (i) physiological mechanisms underlying the control of breathing during sleep, (ii) determine how commonly used drugs, such as sedative hypnotics and opioids, cause respiratory depression and (iii) with this knowledge develop strategies to increase breathing during sleep and in states of respiratory depression.
Dr Sergey Kasparov (Speaker)
Sergey Kasparov (MD, PhD, DrSci) is Reader in Molecular Physiology at the University of Bristol. Previously he worked at Moscow Sechenov Medical Academy. He was a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and worked at the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. His recent work focused on the role of non-synaptic communication in central autonomic control, including the role of nitric oxide and monoamines. He has pioneered research based on the use of cell-specific viral gene expression and dedicates considerable efforts to the development of new molecular and imaging techniques. He has published over 60 research papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Professor Bruce G. Lindsey (Speaker)
Bruce G. Lindsey is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology in the College of Medicine at the University of South Florida (USF). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. His research focuses on the functional architecture and reconfiguration of brainstem neuronal circuits that control breathing and airway defensive behaviours. He served as interim Vice-President for Research at USF from 2001 to 2003. He is a past chair of the Central Nervous System Section of the American Physiological Society and recipient of a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH.
Professor Kenneth J. Muller (Speaker)
Kenneth J. Muller is Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and was founding Director of the Neuroscience Program at the University of Miami School of Medicine. After training at MIT and Harvard, he was at the Carnegie Institution and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore before moving to Miami. Ken Muller taught and organised advanced neuroscience courses at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (with John Nicholls) from 1975-1983, at Johns Hopkins from 1975-1983, at the Marine Biological Laboratory (also with John Nicholls) from 1983-2001, and at the University of Miami, from 1983-2008. Also at the Marine Biological Lab in Massachusetts he was Director of Grass Fellows (1995). He has been a lecturer/instructor in a series of Neuroscience courses and workshops sponsored by IBRO and has served on editorial boards and on numerous study sections of the NIH. His research is focussed on the development and repair of central neural circuits.
Professor Andrea Nistri (Speaker)
Andrea Nistri (MD) is currently full professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy. Prior to his current post, he held academic appointments at the University of Florence, McGill University and Loyola University in Montreal, Canada, St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College and Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, and the University of Pavia. He is honorary professor of Physiology at Kazan Medical University, Russia, and associate editor of the European Journal of Neuroscience. His works concerns molecular, neuronal and network mechanisms of neurotransmitter actions on the mammalian central nervous system with particular reference to trigeminal sensory neurons and the spinal cord. In the last ten years he has also developed studies of brainstem motoneurons in physiological and pathological models. His research is focussed on the processes responsible for rhythmic oscillations of brain and spinal motoneurons and their role in pattern generation and motor function.
Professor Paul M. Pilowsky (Speaker)
Professor Paul M Pilowsky (BMBS, PhD) is a career investigator of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia from which organization he has been continuously funded. He is currently also the Associate Dean (Research) at the Australian School of Advanced Medicine. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers and many reviews and book chapters. His main interests are in the central neuronal systems that regulate blood pressure, respiration and airway function. His work has attracted considerable grant support from various sources and he has served on the editorial boards of many Journals and on the boards of domestic and international scientific councils.
Professor Diethelm Wolfgang Richter (Speaker)
Diethelm Wolfgang Richter (PD Dr. med.) is Professor of Neurophysiology at the Center for Physiology and Pathophysiology of the University of Goettingen since 1988. He has worked at the Universities of the Saarland, Munich and Heidelberg, and was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas and the University College London. He is spokesperson of the European Neuroscience Institute in Goettingen, the DFG Research Centre Molecular Physiology of the Brain and the German Excellence Cluster Microscopy of at the Nanometer Range. His work concerns synaptic processes and neuronal interaction in functional networks, which he studied first in the intact mammalian brain stem, and then in various in vitro systems. In recent years, he has concentrated on the molecular physiology of neuronal and network modulation.
Dr Jeff Smith (Speaker)
Dr Smith received his B.S. degree from the University of Maryland and his Ph.D. degree in physiology from Johns Hopkins University. After postdoctoral research in physiology at Harvard University, neurophysiology at Northwestern University, and a Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Göttingen, Germany, in 1991 he became an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiological Science and Interdepartmental Program in Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Smith moved to NINDS, NIH as Senior Investigator in 1994, and was appointed Chief of the Cellular and Systems Neurobiology Section in 1997. Over the past two decades, his laboratory has studied respiratory motor networks in the mammalian central nervous system as a model system to address fundamental issues in cellular and systems neuroscience. His laboratory combines electrophysiological, imaging, and computational approaches to analyze functional and structural properties of brainstem respiratory circuits.
Professor K. Micheal Spyer (Speaker)
Professor Spyer was appointed UCL's first Vice-Provost (Enterprise) in 2006 with a mission to develop UCL's Knowledge Transfer strategy, together with formulating an effective programme for the promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation in UCL for all staff and students.
Professor Spyer is a neuroscientist with extensive research accomplishments in the field of the central nervous control of the heart, circulation and ventilation. He has provided novel information on the mechanisms by which the nervous system controls heart rate and other indices of cardiac function and how vascular resistance is regulated. He uses contemporary neurophysiological studies, neuropharmacology and molecular techniques. His research has been supported generously by the Wellcome Trust, the British Heart Foundation, MRC and the BBSRC.
He gained his BSc in Physiology in Sheffield in 1966 and PhD in Physiology in Birmingham in 1969. Birmingham University awarded him a DSc for his contributions to biomedicine in 1979. In 1980 Professor Spyer was appointed to the Sophia Jex-Blake Chair of Physiology and Headship of the Department of Physiology in the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. In 1993 he was made Head of the Department of Physiology of University College London whilst retaining his position at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. He was heavily involved in the merger of the Royal Free with University College and during the 1990s was made Vice-Dean of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine and, on the full merger, Dean of the Royal Free Campus of the newly combined Medical School. On 1 October 2001 he took up the post of Dean of the Royal Free & University College Medical School and on 1 November 2002, in addition to his role as Dean, he was appointed Vice-Provost (Biomedicine) of University College London. As a consequence he was involved in managing for UCL the interface between the University and NHS. He has served as a non-executive director on NHS Trusts, and the North Central London Strategic Health Authority. He currently serves as a non-executive Director of the London NHS.
Professor Spyer sits on numerous national and international scientific grant committees and editorial boards and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Medicine by the University of Lisbon in 1991. He was made a Founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998 and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 2002.
He is involved in the exploitation of IP generated in UCL through his Directorship of UCL Business plc, Chairs the Bloomsbury Bioseed Fund, a venture fund supporting several research institutes in London in addition to UCL, and has been a Non-Executive Director of several biomedical start-up companies.