Supervisor View Full Details

• cell and developmental biology/regenerative medicine
• neuroscience and mental health

• Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Paediatrics

• Dementia
• Endocrinology
• Gastroenterology
• Neurophysiology
• Neuropsychiatry
• Pharmacology
• Physiology
• Psychiatry

My current research focus takes a translational approach to the assessment of neurpharmacological indices of stress-related disorders such as depression and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). This approach incorporates studies in both clinical populations and in animal models using early-life stress templates that produce specific disease phenotypes in adulthood. I am particularly interested in the advancing our understanding of how tryptophan degradation along the kynurenine pathway influences psychopathology and in evaluating novel therapeutic interventions which can reverse such deficits. My research also interrogates the impact of microbiota manipulation on the central nervous system. This is a rapidly expanding area of research with enormous potential and one which is studied using the combined approach of germ-free animals, probiotic administration and antibiotic induced dysbiosis.
Recent Publications:

Transferring the blues: Depression-associated gut microbiota induces neurobehavioural changes in the rat (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395616301571)

Kynurenine pathway metabolism and the microbiota-gut-brain axis (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839081630288X)

Regulation of prefrontal cortex myelination by the microbiota (http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v6/n4/full/tp201642a.html)

Acute tryptophan depletion reduces kynurenine levels: implications for treatment of impaired visuospatial memory performance in irritable bowel syndrome (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00213-014-3767-z)

There are currently a number of active research areas in my laboratory including:

Neuropharmacological abnormalities in the clinical psychiatry population

Translational biological markers of stress and cognition

Brain-gut-microbiome axis dysregulation

The biological burden of dementia caregiving

Tryptophan metabolism

Maternal transmission of a stress gut microbiome