Tiago Branco

Tiago Branco studied Medicine in Lisbon and then completed a PhD at UCL with Yukiko Goda, working on synaptic release probability. He did his postdoctoral research with Michael Hausser, where he investigated how single neurons integrate different spatiotemporal patterns of synaptic input, elucidating the role of dendritic active mechanisms in this process. He then spent one year as a visiting scientist at the Janelia Research Campus, collaborating with Scott Sternson on projects on synaptic integration in hypothalamic neurons that control feeding behaviour. 

Tiago’s lab started in 2013 at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and moved to the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in 2016. The main research interest is to understand how instinctive decisions are computed from sensory information, and from representations of the world built from experience. Using a top-down approach to study how ion channels and synapses give rise to the neural dynamics that govern behavioural choices, the main goal of the lab is to build realistic mechanistic models of the computations that support instinctive decision making.