Feldberg Prize awarded to Michael Häusser

Michael Häusser earned his PhD from Oxford University under the supervision of Julian Jack. He subsequently worked with Nobel Laureate Bert Sakmann at the Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and with Philippe Ascher at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He established his own laboratory at UCL in 1997 and became Professor of Neuroscience in 2001, where he has been a Principal Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust since 2011. He is also currently the Facilitator of the International Brain Laboratory, a new global collaboration which aims to understand how the brain makes decisions. Häusser is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of Academia Europaea.

Häusser’s work focuses on trying to understand the cellular and circuit basis of neural computations in the mammalian brain.  To attack this problem his group is working at the interface between cellular and systems neuroscience using a combination of experiments and theory. The aim is to understand the cellular toolkit that enables single neurons to perform specific computations, and in turn how single neurons and their patterns of connections contribute to the computations performed by neural circuits during behaviour. His group has a special focus on neuronal dendrites, which actively transform synaptic inputs into specific neuronal output patterns. The experimental tools being used by the group include two-photon microscopy, patch-clamp recordings from dendrites, recordings using Neuropixels probes, and most recently the development of 'all-optical' approaches for simultaneous readout and manipulation of neuronal activity by combining two-photon imaging and two-photon optogenetics. These experiments are complemented by computational models of single neurons and networks of neurons.

Full contact details:

Professor Michael Häusser
Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT 
UK

Phone: +44-20-7679-6756
Email: m.hausser@ucl.ac.uk 
Website:http://www.dendrites.org/

• Feldberg Foundation
• Neural Computation Lab
• Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Reseach