SPACEBRAIN at the University College London
John O'Keefe is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Anatomy Department. His group in the Anatomy Department includes fully equipped laboratories for recording single units and EEG from rats and mice in open fields and linear tracks. The whole field of single unit recording from hippocampal place cells was established in these laboratories.
Neil Burgess is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience in the Anatomy Department, and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. He took a PhD in Theoretical Physics before turning to neuroscience. He has developed influential models of hippocampal place representation, he has collaborated extensively with O’Keefe and Jeffery in analysis and experimental design of electrophysiological recording experiments, and he has developed the off-line analysis software for the Axona recording system..
Kate Jeffery is a Reader (associate professor) in the Psychology Department at UCL. Her main achievements include a demonstration that a number of the inputs to place cells (including visual) are plastic, that contextual inputs are independently modulated, and a formulation of how these inputs might interact in construction of a context representation.
The O’Keefe and Jeffery groups have generous housing facilities for rats and mice, enabling large numbers (tens or even hundreds) of animals to be held locally, near the recording rooms, which is important in behavioural experiments. UCL also has a large central animal facility with capacity and personnel for mouse breeding and maintenance of mouse lines received from UKL-HD and other institutions.
