Rokas Stonis

Rokas Stonis joined the SWC PhD Programme in September 2024. He previously completed an MSci in Neuroscience at UCL. During his master's in the lab of Prof. Beverley Clark and Prof. Michael Häusser he used two-photon holographic stimulation combined with extracellular electrophysiology to test whether sequential hippocampal activity causally supports the encoding of memory episodes, and to ask how those activity sequences are propagated to subcortical regions and the neocortex.

Rokas is fascinated by how animals flexibly orient innate behaviours. In particular, he is intrigued by how the neocortex and subcortical circuits steer escape trajectories. His PhD asks how spatial representations emerge in the neocortex to enable animals to navigate towards safety through naturalistic environments, studied at both the synaptic and population levels. He is interested in how these representations arise, how stable they are, and whether they causally drive behaviour. To answer this, he combines carefully chosen behavioural paradigms with state-of-the-art techniques for recording and manipulating neuronal activity.