Long-term potentiation – 50 years on

Professor Tim Bliss FRS, MRC National Institute for Medical Research, UK

Tim Bliss was born in England and gained his PhD at McGill University in Canada.  In 1967 he joined the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, where he was Head of the Division of Neurophysiology from 1988 till 2006.   His work with Terje Lømo in Per Andersen’s laboratory at the University of Oslo in the late 1960’s established the phenomenon of long-term potentiation (LTP) as the dominant synaptic model of how the mammalian brain stores memories.  Since then he has worked on many aspects of LTP, including presynaptic mechanisms responsible for the persistent increase in synaptic efficacy that characterizes LTP, and the relationship between synaptic plasticity and memory. In May 2012 he gave the Croonian Lecture at the Royal Society on ‘The Mechanics of Memory’.

Professor Nigel Emptage, Oxford University, UK

"Nigel Emptage is the Professor of Neuropharmacology within the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford (UK) and the Nuffield Research Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He moved to Oxford from the National Institute for Medical Research, London where he worked with Tim Bliss and Alan Fine to develop optical methods with which to measure synaptic activity. The approach, measuring increases in intracellular Ca²⁺ in response to physiological stimuli, has permitted data to be gathered both about the expression mechanisms of LTP as well as fundamental Ca²⁺ signalling pathways in neurones. This approach remains at the core of the laboratory’s ongoing research."

Professor Arturas Volianskis

Cardiff University

Arturas Volianskis is Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience at Cardiff University, where he studies pharmacology and physiology of synaptic transmission, neurotransmitter receptor function and synaptic plasticity; in particular short-term potentiation (STP) and long-term potentiation (LTP). Arturas holds Humanities degree (BA) from Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania and research degrees in Philosophy (MA) and Medicine (PhD) from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. From 1999 to 2006 Arturas first trained as an electrophysiologist, and later worked as a postdoc in Professor Morten S Jensen lab in Aarhus. In 2006 he joined the research groups of Professors Graham L Collingridge and David E Jane at the University of Bristol, where he contributed to the development of new pharmacological tools and researched synaptic plasticity. In 2015 Arturas was appointed Lecturer in Neuroscience, at Queen Mary University in London and in 2021 he moved to Cardiff University.

Professor Hari Bito

University of Tokyo

Haruhiko Bito is a Professor and Chair of Neurochemistry at the University of Tokyo. He graduated from the University of Tokyo with an MD and a PhD in Biochemistry in 1993. After postdoctoral training at Stanford University as an HFSP Fellow, he started his laboratory in Pharmacology at Kyoto University in 1997 before moving to head the Department of Neurochemistry at the University of Tokyo in 2003. Dr Bito has deciphered novel functions of many members of the CaMK family, and elucidated the bidirectional neuronal signaling between the synapses and the nucleus, essential for late-phase plasticity and long-term memory. Dr Bito has also designed powerful molecular tools (E-SARE synthetic activity-dependent enhancer and next-generation Ca2+ indicators XCaMPs) that help capture and measure neuronal ensemble activity critical for cognition. He received the Young Investigator Awards from the Japanese Societies for Pharmacology (2003) and Biochemistry (2004), the Tsukahara Award (2011), AND Investigator Award (Molecular Brain, 2015), and the Setsuro Ebashi Award (2020).

Dmitri Rusakov

University College London

Dmitri Rusakov is a Professor of Neuroscience (since 2007) at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Following his MSc in Physics, he obtained a PhD in Neurobiology-Biophysics from Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology, NAS Kiev. He underwent postdoctoral training at the Open University and the MRC Institute for Medical Research where he started an independent group in 1998, before moving to UCL in 2000. Dmitri set up the UK’s first two-photon excitation-uncaging microscope integrated with patch-clamp, and developed multiplexed time-resolved fluorescence microscopy for intact-brain imaging. His research focuses on the physiology and biophysics of synaptic transmission, astroglia, and neural microcircuits - in the quest to understand the principles of information processing in the brain. He obtained competitive research awards including an MRC Career Development Award, Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship (twice) and Principal Fellowship (twice), as well as an ERC Advanced Grant. Elected a Member of Academia Europaea in 2012.

Dr Pojeong Park

Harvard University, USA

Pojeong Park explores the molecular and biophysical mechanisms underlying synaptic plasticity, which is believed to be a cellular correlate of learning and memory. He has a broad background in neuroscience, with expertise in synaptic plasticity, dendritic biophysics, and memory engrams using advanced optical and electrophysiological methods. Currently as a postdoc at Harvard University, Pojeong is working to understand the rules of spike back-propagation and dendritic electrogenesis in neuronal trees by developing molecular and optical tools for all-optical electrophysiology. He maintains a keen interest in how memory is encoded and retrieved in the brain, and how these functions change in normal and disease states, such as Alzheimer’s disease and autism.

Associate Professor Saji Kumar Sreedharan

National University of Singapore, Singapore

Dr Sajikumar obtained his PhD from the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, Germany, in 2005, focusing on the study of memory mechanisms. He conducted postdoctoral research and served as a group leader at the Technical University in Braunschweig, Germany, investigating the role of metaplasticity in associative memory at the cellular level. His research on synaptic tagging and capture has uncovered crucial mechanisms and molecules involved in associative plasticity and memory formation.

Since 2012, Dr Sajikumar has been a faculty member at the Department of Physiology and Research Director (since 2021) of the Healthy Longevity Translational Research Programme at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. His research primarily revolves around aging, neurodegeneration, synaptic tagging and capture (STC) as a mechanism for long-term memory storage, and metaplasticity for enhancing memory in aging and neurodegenerative neural networks.

Dr Sajikumar serves on the editorial boards of esteemed international journals, including Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Experimental Brain Research, Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience, and Oxford Open Neuroscience. He has been recognized with awards such as the Singapore Neuroscience Association Young Investigator Award (2017), Faculty Research Excellence Award (2017), and Graduate Mentor Award (2021) from the National University of Singapore.

His research has received support from renowned funding bodies, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, National Medical Research Council, Ministry of Education in Singapore, and National Institute of Aging (NIA), NIH, USA.

Professor Sheena Josselyn

Hospital for Sick Children, Canada

Sheena Josselyn is a Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and a Professor in the departments of Psychology and Physiology at the University of Toronto in Canada. Dr. Josselyn holds a Canada Research Chair in Brain Mechanisms underlying Memory, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine (US).

Her undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Life Sciences and a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology were granted by Queen’s University in Kingston (Canada). Sheena received a PhD in Neuroscience/Psychology from the University of Toronto with Dr. Franco Vaccarino as her supervisor. She conducted post-doctoral work with Dr. Mike Davis (Yale University) and Dr. Alcino Silva (UCLA).

Dr. Josselyn received numerous awards, including the Innovations in Psychopharmacology Award from the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CCNP), the Effron Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and the Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences.

Dr. Josselyn is interested in understanding how the brain encodes, stores and uses information. Her primary model organism is mice. However, several human disorders (ranging from autism spectrum disorder to Alzheimer’s disease) may stem from disrupted information processing. Therefore, this basic knowledge in mice is not only critical for understanding normal brain function, but also vital for the development of new treatment strategies for these disorders.