Dr. Helen Barron

Postdoctural Neuroscientist in Cross-species Behavioural Neurophysiology, Supernumerary Fellow of Merton College

Helen studied Natural Sciences at University of Cambridge, before joining the 4-year MRC Clinical Neurosciences PhD program at University College London. Helen's PhD research was supervised by Prof. Tim Behrens and Prof. Ray Dolan at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, London, and completed in September 2015.  During her PhD, Helen used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to investigate mechanisms for memory and decision making in the human brain. From October 2015, Helen moved to the University of Oxford where she completed a three year Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, before taking up her current post. During her three year fellowship Helen worked with David Dupret's Group in the Unit where she developed a cross-species approach to investigate mechanisms for memory retrieval.

Her work involves using multi-channel extracellular recordings and optogenetic tools to obtain microscopic descriptions of memory processes. These microscopic descriptions are then used to inform interpretation of macroscopic measures of human brain activity obtained using fMRI and MR spectroscopy at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. Using this multi-modal approach, Helen's work focuses on questions that include: How are memories stored in the brain? What mechanisms underlie the retrieval of memory? How are memories used to support decision making?