!!John O'Keefe - Biography
\\
John O’Keefe FRS is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, a member of the Cell and Developmental Biology Department at University College London, and a Principal Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2014. He served as the Initial Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour from 2010 to 2016.\\
\\
He is interested in the role of the hippocampal formation in spatial and episodic memory, and navigation. He discovered that hippocampal pyramidal cells in the rat respond selectively to an animal’s spatial location and proposed that these ‘place cells’, and the hippocampal system more generally, might function as a cognitive map underpinning spatial localization and navigation. In 1993, he discovered phase precession, the coding of location by the timing of place cell spiking relative to the hippocampal theta rhythm, still the best evidence for neural coding by spike timing. With Neil Burgess and Eleanor Maguire, he showed how the cognitive map theory could be used to understand the role of the human hippocampus in navigation and episodic memory. \\
\\
In current work, his group is studying how the hippocampal cognitive map supports flexible navigation to a goal in a familiar environment using vector fields.  They are also looking at changes in entorhinal cortical and hippocampal cells in mouse models of Alzheimer’s Dementia and Downs Syndrome.\\
\\
In another line of research, his group is studying the response of cells in the rodent amygdala to naturalistic stimuli such as conspecifics and foods, and how these can be modified by reward.

\\ \\[{ALLOW view All}][{ALLOW edit jokeefe}][{ALLOW upload jokeefe}][{ALLOW comment All}]