Beautiful Mind

When the spinal cord is injured in humans, the consequences are often permanent. But in zebrafish, recovery is possible. Within weeks, they regain movement, not just by regrowing damaged nerves, but by rewiring their entire neural system.
In my research, I study how this recovery actually happens. We’ve found that healing is not a single event, but a carefully timed process. After injury, neurons and their surrounding environment go through a series of changes; some cells protect their neighbors, others adapt their identity, and neural circuits reorganise to restore function. In fact, some cells that were not directly injured can still change their behaviour to support recovery, revealing a surprising level of coordination across the spinal cord.
This work shows that neuroplasticity, the brain and spinal cord’s ability to adapt, is not just a backup mechanism. In zebrafish, it is a central driver of recovery, working hand-in-hand with regeneration.
By understanding how these processes unfold in a regenerative animal, we hope to uncover principles that could one day help improve recovery after spinal cord injury in humans.

Have you ever wondered how you seamlessly transition from a casual stroll to a full-on sprint when you realize you're about to miss your bus? Every movement we make requires our brains to precisely control when to start, how long to keep going, and how fast to move. But how does the brain actually encode these commands?
To answer this, we’re looking inside the minds of adult zebrafish! By combining behavioral tracking, imaging and single cell recordings of their brain activity, we've discovered that the brain doesn't just have one simple "go" button for movement. Instead, it acts a lot like a car with different gears.
In this talk, we'll dive into the brainstem to explore two distinct, newly discovered circuits that control movement. We'll see how one group of neurons acts as "cruise control" for slow, explorative swimming, while an entirely different group acts as the "turbo boost" for sudden, high-speed escapes.

I will use our ongoing study on treatment including psilocybin for depression and our hypothesis as a basis for describing different ways we image the brain and how multiple methods can be used in combination to get as complete of a picture as possible.