News

We are excited to announce that Dr Tim Behrens has joined the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre as a Group Leader. The Behrens Lab at SWC will focus on how brains learn and represent knowledge about the world to enable flexible behaviours. Tim will also retain a portion of his group at the University of Oxford.

Neuroscientists have uncovered how exploratory actions enable animals to learn their spatial environment more efficiently. Their findings could help build better AI agents that can learn faster and require less experience.

Joint SWC/GCNU Group Leader Associate Professor Andrew Saxe has been named a 2023 Blavatnik Awards in the UK Finalist in Life Sciences. Dr Saxe was nominated for his fundamental contributions to the study of deep neural networks, which provide insight into representation learning—the method by which systems discover and organise knowledge—in artificial and natural systems.

Researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL have revealed a brain mechanism that mice use to instinctively escape to shelter when faced with a threat. This is the first time that neuroscientists have been able to find such a clear link between spatial goals and actions.

The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL was delighted to host a celebration event to mark the successful completion of the first year of the new STEM programme, In2research, from social mobility charity In2scienceUK. The event celebrated the achievements of the 50 talented participants in the 2021/22 cohort and gave thanks to partners, supporters and volunteers, who were integral to the success of the inaugural year of the programme.

SWC Group Leader Dr Chunyu Ann Duan has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant of €1.5 million over five years. The proposal selected for funding will cover research on decision-making in a social context.

The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL is delighted to announce that we have received full accreditation from the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) International.

Neuroscientists at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL explored how individual neurons in mice are influenced by two different cognitive and behavioural states – attention and running. In a new study published today in Neuron, SWC researchers found that spatial attention and running influence individual neurons independently with different dynamics.

SWC Group Leader Professor Tiago Branco has been awarded the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture by the Royal Society. Professor Branco was chosen for the award for making fundamental advances in the molecular, cellular and circuit bases of neuronal computation and for successfully linking these to animal behaviour.

In a new study, published in Nature, neuroscientists at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL investigated the reciprocal interactions between two brain regions that represent visual working memory in mice. The team found that communication between these two loci of working memory, parietal cortex and premotor cortex, was co-dependent on instantaneous timescales.

Researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at University College London have discovered that the hippocampus creates a vector-based representation to support animals to make optimal navigation decisions.