Scott Waddell elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences
Professor Scott Waddell FMedSci has been elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. All new Fellows are selected by the prestigious National Academy for their exceptional contributions to the advancement of medical science through innovative research discoveries and translating scientific developments into benefits for patients and the wider society.
Scott has been elected for furthering understanding of neurobiology. His group uses Drosophila to study neural circuit mechanisms of memory-directed and motivated behaviours. Amongst other findings, their research has demonstrated a previously unforeseen heterogeneity of anatomy and function within the dopaminergic system. The work also exemplifies how using genetics to acutely alter the function of smaller subsets of neurons can serve as an effective way of learning how neural circuits operate.
Scott is a founding member of the Centre for Neural Circuits & Behaviour in DPAG, a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science, a member of EMBO, and was awarded the 2014 Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the Life Sciences.
On hearing of his election, Professor Waddell said: “I’m totally honoured and thrilled that the work of my group is recognised by my election to the Academy of Medical Sciences. I have been fortunate to work with, and mentor, many brilliant students and postdocs, in the USA and here in Oxford, and this would not have happened without them.”
Mani Ramaswami
Abstract: We and our collaborators seek to understand molecular mechanisms of long-term memory in identified elements of a memory-encoding circuit in vivo. Our work on the Drosophila olfactory system has a) outlined a simple neural circuit that encodes habituation memory; b) identified likely components and assembly mechanisms for neuronal ribonucleoprotein (RNP) granules; and c) shown how translational control mechanisms and RNP granules participate in mnemonic processes. Our studies indicate that olfactory habituation arises from the potentiation of inhibitory synapses from a sparse group of local interneurons onto excitatory output neurons in the antennal lobe. The underlying synaptic plasticity mechanism, scaled up from small to large circuits, can create negative images (or inhibitory engrams) of object-encoding cell assemblies and so potentially account for habituation across systems and species. This “negative-image model,” recently supported by observations in the mammalian auditory cortex, explains the key behavioral features of habituation (“gating” and “override”) better than any other current model. I will end by discussing arguments developed in collaboration with colleagues in Oxford, which suggest that inhibitory memory engrams, similar to those involved in habituation, can convert recently encoded memories into latent remote memories that remain accessible to recall, and speculate on possible implications for the function and physiology of sleep, atypical psychiatric states, and dreaming.
Biography: Mani Ramaswami is Professor of Neurogenetics and Director of the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, a Wellcome Investigator, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and a PhD student at Caltech in Pasadena. He previously held tenured faculty positions at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore and the University of Arizona in Tucson.