Tim Vogels has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship on "Exploring the spatiotemporal dynamics of memory” and an ERC Consolidator grant on "Machine learning assisted exploration of synaptic plasticity." These highly prestigious awards will fund his lab for the next five years.
Tim has been part of the CNCB since 2013, funded by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship of the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society, and his research group is also part of the neurotheory initiative at the University of Oxford.
The Vogels group uses models of neurons and neuronal networks to distill, re-articulate and extrapolate from our current knowledge of how nervous systems compute and memorise.
Everything we do involves memories, traces of past experiences in our nervous system. They may be events, faces of friends, or words we speak and recognise. Many such memories require precise and reliable timing - for example, to coordinate vocal cords - and they involve thousands of neurons that are connected in complex patterns. New memories are presumably inscribed by changes in these patterns. - Associate Professor Tim Vogels
The support from the Wellcome Trust and the ERC will allow the group to study the neuronal interplay of excitatory and inhibitory activity in nervous systems, and explore the plasticity rules that help construct these networks.