A researcher and lecturer in psychiatry at the University College London (UCL) will spend three months working in the Anticevic Lab at Yale.
Richard Adams, PhD, will begin working at the lab at the end of the summer, said Alan Anticevic, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale, and director of the lab.
Adams will learn to model how alterations in synaptic gain in specific cell types affect working memory, and how these alterations might be detected using EEG and fMRI.
The Bogue Research Fellowships based in the United Kingdom will finance Adams’s visit. The fellowships support graduate students and post docs working in the life and biomedical sciences who want to conduct research in North America. They are intended to “enrich the research experience and help develop the scientific career of the fellow.”
Adams worked as a psychiatric doctor before earning a PhD at UCL. He studied ways to relate computational models of brain function to symptoms and empirical findings in schizophrenia/psychosis.
He is now collaborating on a project to look at the computational role of dopamine 2 receptors in cognition.
“We have known for 60 years that these receptors are involved in psychosis (antipsychotics block them) but it remains unclear what their normal function is in the brain and how they cause psychotic symptoms,” Adams said. “I’m coming to Yale to learn ways of analyzing large amounts of ‘resting state’ brain data (i.e. from just lying in the scanner, daydreaming), as this simple experimental method can tell us quite a lot about how the brain is connected up in subjects with schizophrenia and those without.”
The Anticevic Lab seeks to better understand, at the neural system level, the mechanisms behind cognitive and affective deficits in neuropsychiatric illness. Specifically, its research focuses on understanding these processes in schizophrenia, bipolar illness, and addiction.