Western Neuroscience Speaker Series
The Western Institute for Neuroscience is thrilled to announce the launch of the Western Neuroscience Speaker Series. This series will bring distinguished speakers and academics across the Neuroscience community here to present their innovative and exciting work.
This series will launch in early 2025 and is a self-approved group learning activity (Section 1) as defined by the Maintenance of Certification Program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
All the talks will be held in the University Hospital Auditorium at University Hospital (London Health Sciences Centre) and are all completely free. There is no need to register or RSVP for these talks, and they are open to anyone who might like to attend.
For more information, please contact win@uwo.ca.
March 4, 2025
Speaker: Dr. Chiara Cirelli
Date: March 4, 2025
Location: University Hospital Auditorium, University Hospital, London Health Sciences Centre
Time: 10:00am
Chiara Cirelli received her medical degree and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Pisa, Italy, where she began her investigation of the molecular correlates of sleep and wakefulness and the role of the noradrenergic system in sleep regulation. She continued this work at the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, California as a fellow in experimental neuroscience, and subsequently at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she has been a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry since 2001.
Dr. Cirelli’s research is aimed at investigating the fundamental mechanisms of sleep regulation by using a combination of molecular and genetic approaches. By performing whole-genome expression profiling studies in different species her laboratory has characterized hundreds of genes whose expression changes in neurons and glial cells in sleep relative to wakefulness. This analysis has identified specific cellular processes that are favored by sleep and impaired by sleep deprivation. In a second, complementary approach Dr. Cirelli’s laboratory has been performing a large-scale mutagenesis screening for sleep phenotypes in Drosophila. Several mutant fly lines that have much reduced sleep or are resistant to sleep deprivation have been found. The characterization of the genes mutated in these lines has identified key cellular pathways involved in the regulatory mechanisms of sleep and its functional consequences. Overall, these molecular and genetic studies have shown that sleep need is strongly related to experience-dependent plasticity during wake.
Together with her long-term collaborator, Dr. Giulio Tononi, Dr. Cirelli has developed a comprehensive hypothesis about the function of sleep, the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, according to which sleep serves to renormalize synaptic strength, counterbalancing a net increase of synaptic strength due to plasticity during wakefulness. Without sleep, such progressive increase in synaptic strength would lead to unsustainable costs in terms of energy, space and cellular supplies, would reduce the informativeness of neuronal signals, and would prevent further learning by bringing stronger synapses closer to their level of saturation. In short, according to this hypothesis sleep is the price to pay for brain plasticity during wakefulness.
The synaptic homeostasis hypothesis is being tested at different levels, using electrophysiological and behavioral experiments in humans, in vitro studies in cortical slices, electron microscopy experiments in flies and mice, and fMRI and DTI experiments in humans. Overall, these experiments confirm that wake is associated with net synaptic potentiation, whereas sleep favors global synaptic renormalization, thereby helping to preserve an overall balance of synaptic strength. Current experiments in transgenic flies and mice use confocal and repeated in vivo two-photon microscopy and block-face scanning electron microscopy to confirm that an essential function of sleep is to promote a homeostatic reduction in synaptic strength. Other experiments are also testing whether lack of sleep, especially during adolescence, may have long-term consequences for the functional and anatomical connectivity of the brain.
May 6, 2025
Speaker: Dr. John Krakauer
Date: May 6, 2025
Location: University Hospital Auditorium, University Hospital, London Health Sciences Centre
Time: 10:00am
Dr. Krakauer is currently John C. Malone Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab (www.BLAM-lab.org) at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His areas of research interest are:
(1) Experimental and computational studies of motor control and motor learning in humans
(2) Tracking long-term motor skill learning and its relation to higher cognitive processes such as decision-making.
(3) Prediction of motor recovery after stroke
(4) Mechanisms of spontaneous motor recovery after stroke in humans and in mouse models
(5) New neuro-rehabilitation approaches for patients in the first 3 months after stroke.
Dr. Krakauer is also co-founder of the video gaming company Max and Haley, and of the creative engineering Hopkins-based project named KATA. KATA and M&H are both predicated on the idea that animal movement based on real physics is highly pleasurable and that this pleasure is hugely heightened when the animal movement is under the control of our own movements. A simulated dolphin and other cetaceans developed by KATA has led to a therapeutic game, interfaced with an FDA-approved 3D exoskeletal robot, which is being used in an ongoing multi-site rehabilitation trial for early stroke recovery. Dr. Krakauer’s book, “Broken Movement: The Neurobiology of Motor Recovery after Stroke” has been published by the MIT Press.
