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Prof Caswell Barry
Professorial Research Fellow
Cell & Developmental Biology
Div of Biosciences
- Joined UCL
- 1st May 2007
Research summary
Our mission is to understand the brain - we seek to know what computations it performs and how its architecture performs them. To this end our research is focused on memory, in particular memory for places and events. Led by Prof. Caswell Barry, the lab uses a mixture of experimental and computational approaches including two photon microscopy, high yield electrophysiology, rodent virtual reality, as well as optogenetic and chemogenetic tools. Computationally we deploy machine learning techniques to model the brain and process data in addition to conventional systems-level models. We are based in UCL’s world renowned Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and have extensive collaborative links with other groups in the Neuroscience Domain – benefiting from the sheer range and diversity of the researchers it contains.
Teaching summary
I lecture on several BSc and MSc courses at UCL and also jointly administer the Computational Neuroscience course (NEUR3041).
Education
- University College London
- Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2007
- University College London
- Other higher degree, Master of Science | 2000
- University of Oxford
- First Degree, Bachelor of Arts | 1999
Biography
Prof. Caswell Barry joined UCL’s Cell and Developmental Biology department in 2013, previously being based at the Institute of Neurology with Prof. Neil Burgess. His goal is to build a computational understanding of the neural basis of memory. In other words, explaining how a network of neurons in able to store, update, and retrieve information about the world and events that happen within it. To this end he studies spatial memory and its representation in the hippocampal formation. His lab uses tools such as computational modeling and optogenetic manipulations to understand how the processes of memory formation and retrieval are triggered. In addition to a UCL Excellence Fellowship, Caswell has also been awarded a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society.