Profile

I grew up in Israel, where I worked as an engineer, specialising in robotics and autonomous systems for some years before I fell in love with brain research during my doctorate. I came to Oxford a couple of years ago with my family. I love visiting new places and walking in the countryside, and dream about learning how to sail after Covid!

Parkinson’s disease is a debilitating condition with severe motor symptoms. In my research, I am investigating the encoding of movement by different cells in the basal ganglia, a group of brain regions most affected in Parkinson’s disease, and how such encoding is disturbed. One of the hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease is the accumulation of protein aggregates, called Lewy Bodies, in dopamine-producing cells within specific brain regions. These dopamine-producing cells play a major role in a variety of behaviours, from motor control to action selection and motivation. Importantly, the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are thought to be caused by the malfunction and degeneration of these cells. Although Lewy bodies are clearly relevant for Parkinson’s disease, it is not clear how they affect the health and functions of nerve cells is controversial; they might damage and kill cells or they might help protect cells from excessive abnormal proteins.

If we are to understand what Lewy bodies do, and whether, or how we should target them for therapies, we must first define the effects of Lewy bodies on the electrical and chemical signalling of living neurons in the whole brain. The goal of my research is to explore how Lewy body-like aggregates alter the electrical activity of dopamine-producing neurons in the whole brain, and their ability to release dopamine, before widespread cell death.

To achieve that, I use a mouse model that accurately mimics the form of Lewy Bodies. I measure how Lewy body-like aggregates affect the activity, structure and chemical messaging of dopamine-producing brain cells that are especially vulnerable in Parkinson’s disease.

Each morning I take my daughter to school, then return to my home office to check my emails, plan the day, and update the designs for my experimental setup. When those are finished, I head to the lab to have the new parts 3d-printed, so I can start using them tomorrow. I then go upstairs to the animal house, check on the welfare of my mice, and turn on my equipment. Today’s main experiment is to record the dopamine signals in a mouse brain while it runs on a treadmill. I gently handle one of my trained mice, put it on the treadmill, and connect a couple of optical fibres to implants in its brain. I let it run as much as it wants for an hour, then put it back with its cagemate. After I tidy up, I return to the lab space, where I discuss with my colleagues the concentrations of a new antibody we use to reveal specific proteins that interest us in the brain. I then proceed to put these antibodies in a couple of vials with brain slices, and tomorrow they will be ready for imaging in the microscope. The end of the day came so quickly, I’d better walk home quickly to be on time for a bedtime story.