IPL - Ruth Empson "Mind the Gap"

[00:00:04]Catania 2tt Catania takaka Catania ho Kekoa ho - hey mauriora Ingham Anna Maria ro Rocketeer amah tena koe tow tena koe tow tena koe tu noreda kauai Oh ko Harlan hain taka lingua Cote - Milwaukee Oh Tay fatty guanaco Otago aho nami he knew Akiko tena koe tow tena koe tow tena tato katoa my name is Harlan hain and I have the great privilege of being the vice chancellor here at the University of Otago and it is a great pleasure for me to be here to open this inaugural professorial lecture for professor Ruth Empson these lectures are really a time of celebration for the university community they obviously provide an opportunity for us to showcase the internationally recognised teaching and research expertise of our staff but more importantly perhaps they also provide a unique opportunity for our brand new professors to tell the story of their academic journey and as we've learned over the years these journeys often involve the very special people in their lives people who contributed to their work and people who supported them along the way and in my experience it's these human stories that stick with us long after the lecture is over the path to professor here at the University of Otago is not an easy one in order to receive the promotion the applicant must demonstrate excellence in teaching in research and in service to the university and to the wider community as you will learn during the course of her lecture this evening professor Empson is a motivating teacher she is popular with both undergraduates and postgraduate students she also has an outstanding track record of research and tonight we will learn more about her groundbreaking research on brain connections and behavior and last but certainly not least Ruth has also provided outstanding service to her department to the University to the wider research community Ruth on behalf of the University of Otago it gives me great pleasure to congratulate you on your very well-deserved promotion to Professor and I will now call on Professor Vernon ward who will tell us just a little bit more about Ruth's academic journey to Professor noreda tena koe tow tena koe tow tena Tata Tata thank you very much Vice Chancellor tena koe to Qatar Hawaii Nui tak welcome everybody this is Professor Ruth empson's inaugural professorial lecture and it's my task and privilege as dean of the school of biomedical sciences to introduce professor incent to you this evening so I'd like to thank you all for coming along and a nice warm evening with no air-conditioning an IPL is an important component of celebrating and recognizing a successful academic career so professor Empson actually got a professorial promotion last year but lives in a way for a year on research and study leave so for anybody thinking that it's an out it's not you'd be sure that you cannot escape from an IPL for those of you who do not know professor signaling a successful act got an MA and Natural Sciences from Oxford University in 1988 before obtaining her PhD at Appirio College in the UK in 1993 in the field of neuroscience so it was a 25 year journey for her from gaining her PhD through to professor so then it's a long journey along the way she's held fellowships and the Germany she's also then back to the UK and Oxford Birmingham and she had a period as a senior scientist that service limited in the UK and I did have a little joke but it's probably better I don't say so she spent seven years as an academic at Royal Holloway in the UK before joining us here at Otago as a senior lecturer in 2007 she was subsequently being promoted to associate professor in 2014 before receiving her professorship in 2018 she's certainly earned her promote - professor she has an H index of 35 and that's a very good H index for those that think of such things over 2,800 citations she's published in prestigious journals such as neuron the Journal of Neuroscience Journal of physiology and she reviews widely - whole raft of quality journals she's had substantial research funding as a principal investigator including from the BBSRC in the time in the UK the Marsden fund here in New Zealand and a whole plethora of different funding organizations over her career she's very active and a whole raft of professional bodies including roles and foundations and symposia and conference chair ships advisory committees board roles and all sorts of those things and they and placed like for the neurological foundation for the Australasian neuroscience society the brain research and New Zealand center of research excellence and there's a long list beyond that one area I would highlight is how active professor in saunas and our outreach activities she does a lot of public lectures she does a lot of commentaries and the press things like ask a scientist for the OD tea is there but she also does a lot of things with the discipline speaking in the community organizing various organization meetings in the community talking to you three a and on these are on topics like movement tremors brain and things that actually you know many of us realize are really important so she describes her research life as a journey of investigation into how connections and our brains work these gaps or synapses are where information flow is transformed and also controlled understanding these connections and how they change is critical to understanding how our brains work and how they don't work so for this inaugural professorial lecture professor Empson will explore his scientific and academic path introducing and thanking people and celebrating the work they have done she will take you on a journey from isolated synapse research 20 to 30 years ago to what's happening today in terms of studying sign APS's and living awake and behaving animals quite the journey with that I'd like to invite professor Emerson to present her inaugural professora lecture entitled mind the gap and connections and behavior noreda Tina Tammy IKEA etiquette our peer Nakata Tina Qatar Qatar so thank you very much humming and thank you very much Vernon for those wonderful introduction and thank you all so much for being here I'm totally overwhelmed and what a huge privilege it is for you to all be here and thank you all very much for coming so I hope what I'm going to do is give you a taste of the journey that my scientific career has been and the title is a little bit of a play on words in terms of connections because the part of the break the part of the brain that I work on is those synaptic connections but the connections with people have been as harine was saying is the is where I want to take you today and show you some of those very important connections and no doubt I haven't and can't talk about everyone because well that would take me a very long time but and so there are I hope that you know if I don't talk about certain parts of my work people won't be offended by that so I'm going to start off with a map of the London Underground and those of you who have travelled the London Underground will be aware of that voice that says mind the gap and they're talking about the gap between the train and the station and I love this image of this map because it's a useful map but it also makes me think about the brain and the stations along the way the junctions if you like that you can take a new train at and go in a different direction and our brains are full of these connections too as we'll see infinitely more complex than the London Underground is if the London Underground wasn't complicated enough for some of us as well so but the thing about the London Underground is it takes millions of passengers every day from one place to another and it does so under immense pressure but it has all of these stations or places where you can change connections and that builds in a huge resilience to this network and our brains are immensely resilient to all of that that we throw at them and so these connections where in where you as a passenger can change or where information flow in the brain can change are fundamentally important and so it's those connections that I'm going to talk about today so what is a synapse and I'm going to call it a synapse showing my British accent you might hear it as a synapse but I'm probably going to say synapse for most of the time it's a junction or gap between nerve cells where a nerve impulse so this is nervous system information your thoughts right now are going across these synaptic gaps and it's where that information gets transferred from one nerve cell to another so it's a it is a real physical gap and information crosses that gap and it's actually transformed as it crosses that gap it crosses that physical gap electrical activity here at what we call the terminus as another transport analogy for you the terminal here the presynaptic terminal gets transferred to this post synaptic terminal via this transformation and that transformation and what might be going on in that transformation has fascinated me since well since I started learning about neuroscience and so why would I spend 30 years of my life thinking about these structures and these systems well they're fundamentally important and understanding them is a fundamental for our knowledge of how the brain works and we're a long way from understanding that but the synapse is within our brains are connecting the different parts of our brain that get recruited as you're listening to me right now but sine APS's are also important for us to understand where our body is we've got in from coming to into from our bodies into our brain and our brain is sending signals back out to our bodies and the synapse is and connections that make up all of that are critical to enable us to move for example so when we're thinking about synapse is there fundamental for knowledge sake but in in many or any neurological disease that you can think of sign apps is are going to be altered and messed up in some way so for that reason they're important to study so mind the gap we're going to talk about a slightly different sort of gap now there's a physical gap and there's also a gap in time and this is a recording from my PhD work and I'm going to call it a squiggly line for want of a better word and I want you to remember this image for a little bit later on in the talk as this squiggly line and what I'm doing in this work that I'm going to talk about a little later is I'm recording the electrical activity on this side and I'm stimulating this side and you'll see that there's something we call a baseline and then you'll see there's a gap in time this is time going along here very very fast this is happening and there's a short delay where's nothing it seems to happen and then something happens squiggly line changes direction well actually everything is happening in this gap in that gap it looks as if nothing's happening but it's that transformative process that is going on in that gap in time so this gap in time is very very important and we'll talk about that I'll bring that into something at the end of the lecture as well so synapse is there this gap gap in space gap in time and they're critical for information transfer they're these junctions or connection there are kind of a go or no-go place where information is transferred or not transferred a little bit like coming up to a junction in your car actually you really should stop here but you might not you might decide that you're not going to stop but hopefully you will stop and there will be a decision as to which way you go or you might actually decide to just stay where you are and the way that this works is with another key feature within neuroscience which is something called the action potential and what I'm showing here in the blue is a kind of an artist's impression of a squiggly line that could squiggly line that I just showed you there's actually no there's a little gap here and when that squiggly line when the size of that change goes above a certain value that is defined by natural and physical constants the an action potential is generated and is so-called fired and that action potential is the means by which information travels long distances but it has to be initiated by the synapse by what's happening at this synapse so information travels through our bodies down down effectively biological wires both in and out of our brains via this activation process or this go/no-go system and this is a picture of a cerebellar brain cell it's one of my favorite and Euron's we record from them in in my lab on a daily basis and they're so beautiful you can't possibly not fall in love with this beautiful structure and they're beautiful because they also receive many many thousands of sign APS's the Purkinje neurons they sit in the cerebellum the cerebellum is at the back here of your head and right now you've got thousands and thousands of Purkinje neurons that are actually talking to each other and communicating with each other and if we zoom in on this and this King jr. on actually puts out information down that wire when you make a movement or alter a movement or adjust a movement so that's what the cerebellum is important for and if we zoom in onto that neuron that looks complicated enough as it is what we see is even more complexity we see these little structures that are all individual synapses so I showed you that sort of one on one individual synapse I can't even count them all so you start to see that my map of the London Underground is a vast simplification for what the brain might actually look like so the complexity and beauty of the brain really fascinated me from the beginning of my research career and it's been a huge privilege to be able to explore that beauty and it all started with my PhD I guess and this is this is my supervisor professor John Jeffries this is where I did my PhD it's in Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington some of you might recognize this this image if you follow Kate and William or any of the royal family maybe so nobody will own up to that but the Royal babies are all born in the Lindo wing that sim marries and the Lindo wing goes I think just around the corner from here the department where I did my PhD is right here so I it was a department of physiology and biophysics and John took me on board I was interested in learning more about neurotransmitters ion channels and he nurtured that interest in neuroscience in me but I also wanted to just note that John himself has a very distinguished background John is still active he's in Oxford these days but he and I was one of many of his PhD students there's a whole list of them and he himself was a PhD student of a neurologist called Tom Sears at the institute of neurology and Tom Sears was one of many many PhD students of Sir John Kerry Eccles and Sir John Kerry Eccles although it says a and you there which stands for Australian National University that's not that's true but Sir John Eccles was also in physiology at Otago and he is a tar goes only Nobel prize-winner and although he didn't get his Nobel Prize when he was at at agro he got it when he was at amu much of the work that he did towards figuring all of the stuff that he got the Nobel Prize for was done in Physiology in Lindo Ferguson building in the basement actually where my labs are right now so I feel this tremendous connection to John Eccles and John Eccles himself was one of PhD students many PhD students of Sir Charles Sherrington who is one of my heroes I have funny heroes but he was a Nobel Prize winner for Physiology in the early part of the 20th century and I'll come back to Sherrington a little bit as well so I don't want to presume too much but you could maybe say that I was one one of many great great granddaughters of Eccles made me I'm sure he doesn't know what he definitely doesn't matter so John nurtured in me this strong desire to to understand circuits in the brain we were working on a seizure model together understanding epilepsy and what drives epileptic seizures and I learned how to make these intricate recordings getting tiny electrodes into single neurons and recording their electrical activity as they were doing things within their circuit and this is a figure that John always used to show lots because he really loved it because it's actually a very long-lasting seizure-like event that's actually happening within a bunch of neurons you know in a dish but what I want to point out to you is that you'll notice that there are some squiggly lines here and these are if we zoom into those squiggly lines we can see these shapes that look a little bit like that squiggly line that I showed you before except now they're all happening together there's there's a barrage of electrical activity that is happening at a whole large number of signups --is that eventually results in the activation of this seizure-like event and so my PhD was trying to figure out why this was happening and I was very proud to get my my paper published in the Journal of physiology which is still the most eminent physiology journal in the world and long may it be so it was the place we all wanted to publish at that time and still do actually so after my my time in London which was wonderful and fascinating and challenging and all of all of those things I I was very fortunate to get a Royal Society exchange program fellowship that took me to Germany and I originally went to Cologne to work with a epileptologist clinical epileptologists scientist over Heineman and I went to vers la because I wanted to do to learn more about how synapse is change and here we've got some more squiggly lines exactly the same but here we're modulating them with something called v HT v HT is serotonin and serotonin is the chemical that is elevated by many antidepressant drugs and these were in their heyday at this time when we did this work and we wanted to know more about how they how they acted two remarkable people that I really want to say something about is that dima was a student and andreas was a young postdoc in the lab in Cologne and we all moved the lab about a year into my fellowship which was perfect timing we move we'd strip the lab down and moved it in lots of trucks across Germany to Berlin to the Sherratt a which was in the is the old eastern part of Germany and remember this is the time when the wall had not come along come down and it was a very exciting time and a very challenging time actually to be setting up a lab it was a lot of fun and we worked very very hard and Dima and andreas we worked very hard together I really learnt the great value of collaborating and working with other people when I was in Hoover's lab it was a really important lesson we're all a little introverted aren't we or some of us are and learning to work with others is is part of it part of the deal you can achieve so much more so Dima now heads up one of the most powerful and successful neuroscience centres in Europe at the charity is a outstanding scientists in person Andrea and andreas is there a director of a Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg these are very very important people or talented people and we we were very productive and that would became very important for my career but we were brought together by this man who was very very good at bringing people together making people work together sometimes and that's that was his great skill and sadly over passed away a couple three years now ago but he was very very important in my career he he was doing things and I never even knew he was and that's actually what happens that's the Marvel of it all and so a couple of years ago Hoover had Hoover was German of course and he had a great belief in forging German Israeli connections was very very important to him and I actually benefited from some of those Israeli connections as well and here we are at a kibbutz just outside of Tel Aviv to it two years ago Here I am his Dima his Andreas and we got together and we celebrated Hoover's scientific life which was just amazing and it just shows the esteem that he was held in and what a what an amazing legacy of all the people all over the world who benefited from his mentorship so I was enormous ly privileged to to be there a couple of years ago so the work in Hoover's lab was really really powerful it was really it was really important but I was like interested I was getting interested in what what drives this transformation what drives the the synapse is to work and it comes down to calcium and calcium y'all know is important in your diet you have to make sure you take it in and you'll think oh that's important for my bones yes it is it's also important for many many many other things and not least is the triggering of these synaptic events I wanted to learn more we did a little bit of they did a little bit of this in with Dima in Germany and we used a very old technique which was to look at extra set so we would we were looking at calcium not in the terminal which was where I really wanted to look at it but outside and calcium is at a high concentration outside of living cells and at a low concentration inside living cells and calcium can enter the cell or enter the compartment such as this terminal it goes through channels that allow it through and we what we did was that we actually measured the outside calcium here there's a little trace here another wiggly line slightly different kind of wiggly line but what we showed was that serotonin was actually decreasing the calcium signal and that and that was part of how it was acting but this was a very I don't know unsophisticated way of looking at this problem and I wanted to actually be able to measure the calcium inside the terminals and at the towards the end of the time that I was in Berlin on my fellowship I actually suffered a quite serious health setback I became incredibly allergic to laboratory rodents which is a bit of a problem you might say that they got their own back but it happens to many people and it was largely due to some of the conditions we were under in in in Berlin because things were very chaotic and so I my immune system needed to have a rest from being close to laboratory animals and oh there were people who said oh well you that's the end of your career you can't do it anymore I didn't really want to listen to that obviously and I was very fortunate to actually find a way through but actually turned out to be even better than I could have imagined because I learnt how to measure calcium using some of the really modern techniques that were around at the time using something called calcium sensitive fluorescent dyes and I went back to Oxford to pharmacology in Oxford and I worked with Antony Galliani who is a very very smart man and now if he's um he was head of department of pharmacology for nine years and has now just got a Wellcome Trust senior investigate that gives him time to just focus on his research he's a very very smart guy and I benefited hugely from working with Anthony even though I was working on of all things sea urchin eggs and what you see here is a sea urchin egg at the at the time at the moment of fertilization the sperm has bound to the egg here and there's a calcium wave that crosses the egg and the mechanisms that are involved in that calcium wave are actually also present in many many other cells their primordial mechanisms that are fundamental for calcium handling in neurons hearts eggs and also we did a little bit of work in synapse is towards the end and that period of time in Anthony's lab was enormously productive at gaining publications in what we call high-impact journals this was a very hot field a little bit like this lecture paper it was a very hot field and it was competitive and we were we were there amongst amongst that competitive field and it was really I guess those papers plus the the productivity that I'd had in ubers lab working with andreas and dima that really was was the foundation for getting my first academic position at Royal Holloway and as I said this was a competitive field and as a young scientist you can't necessarily play with the big boys because you this is just a little bit for the young scientists among the audience and I decided that I needed to look at the problem from a different angle than everybody else and so I decided to look not so much at what was happening with calcium coming into the cell but what's happening when calcium goes out of the cell so the fact that calcium at a high concentration can come in to the CEL where there's a low concentration of calcium is something we call a chemical gradient it's like a downhill calcium goes downhill along its chemical gradient and easily gets into the cell but if there's too much calcium in this compartment or in this cell things can go wrong and it has to be got back rid of and if you've ever skied you'll know that to have this you have to go back up the hill at some point and that takes energy or you can take the the chairlift which also takes energy so my my I don't know my niche that I started to dwell in and to learn in when I went to Royal Holloway as a young academic was to look at what this this getting calcium out of the neuron was important for and again I was really really lucky because I was able to collaborate with other people on this kind on this kind of question and this this this is us getting 400,000 pounds for our neuron project this was a big deal in 2001 still seems like quite a lot of money and this is the on campus and i my auntie died last year and i cleared out her house and she had saved this so we're thankful for all the people for saving real pieces of paper I think we should learn from that so here we are this is philipbeasley myself mark Crompton and George Dixon and we had this collaborative grant which was really pivotal for the beginning of my scientific career my independent scientific career I was also lucky to get some good students and I'll talk about a few good students so this this molecule here p.m. CA this doesn't roll off the tongue very well but this is like the ski lift taking you back up the hill this is the molecule that gets calcium out of cells and is important for controlling the the calcium inside the cell and Tom Jensen who's now a research fellow at University College London Queens Square very talented hard-working young PhD student and he's at the Institute of Neurology now which is a very prestigious institution in London he set out to look to see if he could find this this protein this mechanism at synapses and he found it at the presynaptic terminal and not on the postsynaptic terminal so it's perhaps important for controlling the calcium that's going to be that trigger for the synapse to work and what he also showed is that it was this this protein this pmc a chairlift doesn't matter what it is called really that it was important because it was enriched or a greater levels than we might expect in presynaptic terminals so he said about looking at what the impact of this protein might be and we've got some more squiggly lines here they're going in a different direction that's just technical but what you'll see is these events here are marked by these little bars these represent a trap that transformative process within that little squiggle the transformative process that the synapse is happening and when he blocked this molecule I think you'll agree if you look at the red squiggly lines that there are more of them there and so this told us that excuse me this told us that this was important for the way in which the synapse would work and this was great and Tom got a great publication out of another Journal of physiology paper and he was happy but I wasn't particularly happy because we didn't know how this relates to behavior how does this relate to behavior what's what's the point of all of this and this is where another very important connection became clear in the literature it had been shown that this p.m. CA was when you removed it from an animal the animals developed an ataxia a movement disorder and this gave indications that this was important and it had also been shown that the p.m. CA was very highly expressed in the cerebellum that area of the brain back here that is important for movement and so I wanted to study synapse is in the cerebellum and I wrote to this man Thomas crop 'fl who was in Japan at the time and I wrote to him and said please can I come to your lab and learn how to record synapse is from the cerebellum thinking I would never hear anything more and he wrote back and says yes of course you can come when do you want to come so I went to Japan and I learnt these techniques as a young academic and I learned how to record calcium in presynaptic terminals which is what I had been wanting to do and these presynaptic terminals are these so called parallel fiber synapses like railway tracks war railway analogies and they run the full length of your cerebellum and along these little railway tracks are these sign apps it's that I was going to study so what I did was I learnt how to measure that presynaptic calcium and what I'm going to show you is this is where the fluorescent dye we use the fur essent dye to monitor the calcium and we fill the the railway tracks with that dye and then we can stimulate those sign-ups ha's and you have to be careful you don't miss it and that is that rocket-like like signal is a presynaptic event event in those terminals there it goes I what we showed is that the behavior and the kinetics of those terminals and the way in which calcium was being handled in those terminals was slower I won't go into the details and that this might be really really important for why these mice have this cerebellar ataxia or movement disorder so we were at the start of linking the biology or the synapse physiology with the behavior so this got me interested in spinocerebellar ataxia which are rare a rare movement disorder seated within the cerebellum within the part of the brain I've talked about and there are rare disease and I'm going to say something about rare diseases because rare diseases can often illuminate things that we that we wouldn't see in a more widespread disease and it's a reason why we should study them because we can learn new and important things from those rare diseases and of course they're not well treated either so I'm just going to play you a little clip it's not very long of someone who has attacks yet it's happened to me a few times people thinking that I was drunk now I was getting in my car Brighton and I was getting in and lady came over to the car her hands to stop me pulling away and just said you can't drive in that condition and I then sort of got out much so bad I said what my cycle condition attack see it's a degenerate neurological disorder and which affects your balance and coordination obviously some things I can't do like I've gotta get things off high shelves and taking hot things at the ovens it weighs bit of an issue I'm okay I'm still driving around I just sit down a lot as far as the future goes I really don't know what to expect it could be a case for us at the same level or it could be a case where I get a lot worse quite quickly but only time will tell me so that gives you a glimpse into the life of someone with ataxia it's terrible oh no we won't listen to it again it's terrible so we were fortunate when I came to at our go to get again through a collaboration to get access to a mouse model of ataxia a different one and this is where another talented PhD student Emmitt power comes in so Emmitt started working on this model and here's Emmitt so Emmitt got his PhD a couple of years ago and his other great achievement in the last couple of years is is roan and sat here I don't know if moments here maybe not but so Emmett in Nicole is and Ronan so Emmitt started looking at the sign APS's in this model and what he noticed was that a particular type of action at actually these railway track parallel synapses were overactive that's unusual in a neurological disorder we tend to think of losing things rather than gaining something and so this was quite important in the field it was it's become a little controversial in the field but these these animals in the early stages of their ataxia when they're not very behaviorally compromised they have these altered type the timing of these connections is altered and it went on then to try and understand what was behind this and of course came down to calcium again so that's a little what Emmet is doing here he's recording from a Purkinje neuron and he's stimulating those railway tracks and if you didn't catch it the first time there it goes again so a very local area of that neuron is the calcium is elevating in that cell it turns out that that calcium is probably what's driving some of the neuro degeneration in this disorder and we took that work forward and actually were able to rescue the behavior in these mice with a drug that just tweaked down that over activity and Mohammed what going to the details but Mohammed in the lab who's a PhD student has been working on that problem for about three years and we've had an immense luck and to get money from Roche to help us do this and you'd learn just how long and how complicated is it is to start developing drugs for real youth so Roche has a rare diseases group and they focus and put put funding around the world to look at these rare diseases because they value their importance and we're a long way moment for trying to get this drug into into patients but we're still trying so in the last few minutes Mohammed has got that task in the last few minutes I want to go back to Sherrington my my hero and Sherrington was a great physiologist and towards the end of his life he wrote a philosophical book which is highly poetic and actually way beyond me to be honest and in it he has a vision about seeing electrical activity in the brain something but he couldn't even comprehend as reality in the 1940s and this is an artist's impression of what came to be known as Sherrington sparks so what you're seeing here is lighting up of these synaptic connections and Sherrington was saying what would the brain look like if we could see the activity and we've actually been working on this problem for the last four or five years and largely because we've been very fortunate to work with Thomas and this is of where he's been incredible again and working in a collaborative manner internationally and so Thomas was working at Rican brain brain Science Institute in Japan a large amount of money being allocated to research into the brain and he has spent 25 years developing a means of seeing electrical activity in the brain and it's coming to from to fruition and his is continuing to come to fruition so Thomas had developed this so-called sensor so instead of me putting tiny electrodes into single neurons with painstakingly and frustratingly amounts of time required we can now image just as we have been imaging that calcium we can image electrical activity and we were fortunate to get collaboration with the Allen Institute for brain science in the US all of you will know who Bill Gates is I'm guessing and Paul Elam co-founded Microsoft and Paul Allen put an enormous amount of his philanthropic money into on developing pipelines for understanding the brain and we were lucky to get on for one of those pipelines and sadly Paul Allen passed away I think last year or a couple of years ago and so we threw out the Allen Institute developed a mouse we got access to that Mouse and we've started working with it and we are now doing work in mice that are awake and behaving and doing things that I'm going to show you Xavier here is we call we call Xavier be Mouse whisperer because he can train my students and train them to sit still and train them to do things that he wants them to do it's a very big skill and Dan here is it's also a bit of a mouse Whisperer on the quiet but has been important for developing all the computational tools that we've needed to do this work so we are imaging the mouse brain through their skull so we're not that the skull is intact the mouse is imaged the brain is imaged and their mouse is awake and I'm going to show you one of our really exciting maps so the mouse gets a little vibration - it's poor it's a bit like youth feeling a haptic feedback on your phone just like that not at all painful or just a little stimulus very short we call it light touch and what you're looking at is the nose here and the tail here and something happened that was the light touch I'll play it again so what we're seeing is a spark of activity maybe something like Sherrington spark in the brain of this mouse as it's perceiving that light touch so this is a brain signature for a perception and we think that's very very exciting you may not but I definitely do and what I'd really like to say coming back now remember that squiggly line I wrote showed you right at the very beginning when we look at the time course of those events that I've just showed you in the living awake Mouse there's a baseline there's an activation which is the light when the light touch happens and then there's something there's a gap there's a space in time before the activity happens and of course what's happening in this space of time is the activation of those connections that I've just been talking about so we are now seeing real connections at work in a real living awake and behaving mouths and that is very for us and for Neuroscience actually really rather important so I hope I brought you a full circle from an old-fashioned style of work to something that's very new and hopefully is really groundbreaking and not too many people have seen these light sensation touch maps so it's a real privilege to be able to show them and we've pioneered all of this here at Otago and it's been it's been really fantastic so I don't enjoy it on too long but I do just want to say a little bit about people if my computer hasn't frozen there we go so I think it's really important that I am but I thank my parents for bringing me into the world there they are and that's probably the only time you've ever seen me in a dress it's a bit of a weird dress but anyway I liked it and yeah I'm very grateful for my family for bringing me into the world I'm also very grateful for other families along the way that have been really pivotal as well not least my scientific family that I've just talked about but um this is probably the only photo that you'll see me wearing makeup so it's it is me I promise just that's just the teeth you can see so I I this was on reserve forces army training commissioning course actually and this is a general-purpose machine gun so I don't know how many IPL's have got where you're faced with a gpmg anyway somehow I always ended up carrying it and this is another part of that army family so I was 18 did it but did that for 18 years and you know I think I look about 12 there and and probably there as well so the the army family shared values shared connections different different life completely was very very important to me as an academic trying to understand that people outside of academia are a little bit different and think about things differently and here in Otago and here in Dunedin I'm really privileged to be part of to church families and it's really wonderful to see my church family here today both at some Pauls and at All Saints and if you want to understand what taizé chanting is we do it on a Sunday night and we'd be very welcoming all the saints and of course to my rotary friends and again I am very very grateful to the rotary people that I can see thank you for coming as well and I'm just going to love oh yes education I'm the only person in my family to go to university and for me education was a very powerful force and I think Senator Fulbright says said that education is a slow and powerful force and it is and it always should be and I feel enormous read privilege to be in education being able to maybe influence a few people along the way as people influence me and it's really important to hold on to the great value and empowerment that education brings so I'm just going to finish there with several acknowledged months all the people who all the various organizations and money that has powered this work over the years which I'm immensely grateful for and take very very seriously comes out of people's pockets and we should treasure it and use it well and I'm gonna now leave with a few names hopefully that come so just family we started with the Caples we're ending with the green stone and family their school teachers University Army some not longer here with us some of you might see your name some of you might not divvy you don't then you know who you are and physiology mentors and colleagues very very importantly my time in in Otago and internationally too with that thank you very much [Applause] cool okay got it now so as I said my privilege to be able to think Ruth it's an enormous event for her to tell us about her journey and for one I really appreciate that I've learned quite a lot about Ruth things I didn't know where as I felt I knew her relatively well you've showcased a lot of your strengths and I just want to spend a couple of minutes kind of gathering together those strengths that you've shown us through your talk first your passion for neurophysiology and how that came full circle as you said from when you were a student to now where you're pioneering new techniques another big one is kind of tackling the big questions a texia it's a may be rare but it's Ruth said if we can find out what's happening at the molecular level down in the brain then that will help understanding the brain and other disorders but Ruth doesn't tackle it from one angle she's a physiologist she's a great you know does a lot of tradition electrophysiology but she combines it with molecular approaches dynamic imaging is you saw whole animal behavioral models that you've seen in a lot of computational analysis behind it and of that package together as a real strengths of Ruth's research Ruth's an early adopter of novel and often untested technology and she showed us it was through that collaboration with Thomas not full and she's that's been carrying on for a decade or more and she's shown us today with that light touch image you know that's using that technology and we should be very proud that she as she said as she's pioneering it here at Otago she's able to do that work here with the help I should add of all these people that she has mentioned and she has a large lab and they're all very committed to that research finally I think as an audience we've seen Ruth's really powerful scientific communication skills professor Ward mentioned previously Ruth's invited to give publicly where she can break down this really quite complex physiology to something that is accessible to a public audience not only with community groups but she's had a long history working with brain day working with students high school students for example who come into the university International Science Festival and so on she really takes it quite seriously that as scientists we need to be communicating with the public in helping them to understand where their tax dollars go to support us in our research so please join me and thank him Ruth again for a really great OPR [Applause] you're an important event next we can't let this occasion go without some commemorative gifts so Ruth would you be able to come and accept this is on behalf of the University and the department of physiology and I like you to note the butterfly paper [Applause]