Sir Charles Sherrington Prize Lecture: Lighting Up the Brain


Regrettably only those personally invited will be seated in the lecture theatre due to COVID restrictions. Masks must be worn. The lecture will be available on the Microsoft Teams platform, and can be accessed via the link below.

To access the lecture online via Teams: tinyurl.com/4ewxch3h
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ABSTRACT

In two decades, optogenetic control of neuronal activity has developed from a far-fetched idea to a widely used technique. My lecture will recount how this happened, drawing on the earliest and latest results from my lab. To illustrate what is now possible, I will present recent work on the regulation and function of sleep. Optogenetics has allowed us to pinpoint neurons whose sleep-inducing activity switches on as sleep deficits accrue, revealed how this activity switch works, and furnished a molecular interpretation of sleep pressure, its accumulation, and its discharge.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Gero Miesenböck is Waynflete Professor of Physiology and founding Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford in 2007, he held faculty appointments at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Yale University.

Miesenböck has received many awards for the invention of optogenetics, including the Brain Prize, the Massry Prize, and the Shaw Prize. He is a member of the Austrian and German Academies of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

ABOUT SIR CHARLES SHERRINGTON

In 1913, Sir Charles Sherrington came here to the Department in Oxford as the Waynflete Professor of Physiology; Charles was recommended for the chair unanimously without any other candidates being considered. He said of Oxford that its real function in the world “is to teach…what is not yet known”.

Sherrington received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1932 with Edgar Adrian for their work on the functions of neurons. Prior to the work of Sherrington and Adrian, it was widely accepted that reflexes occurred as isolated activity within a reflex arc; instead Sherrington and Adrian showed that reflexes require integrated activation and demonstrated reciprocal innervation of muscles, a principle now known as Sherrington’s Law.

Read more at www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/named-lectures/charles-sherrington-lecture.
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The lecture will be followed by the Sherrington Plaque unveiling. In line with government restrictions, only 30 people will attend the unveiling.