Interim Director of the Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre appointed

19 November 2010

Professor John O’Keefe has been appointed as Interim Director of the Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre at University College London (UCL).

The Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (SWC) is a joint programme between the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

SWC neuroscientists will use state-of-the-art molecular and cellular biology, imaging, electrophysiology and behavioural techniques, supported by computational modelling, to find out how brain circuits process information to create neural representations and guide behaviour.

Professor O’Keefe is an internationally recognised neuroscientist in the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at UCL. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and has received a number of prestigious awards including the Grawemeyer Prize in Psychology and the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience. His own research concentrates on the hippocampus, an area of the brain crucial to the storage of spatial and episodic memory.