F Langston

Biography

After completing my undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh I took the opportunity to stay there for a BBSRC-funded PhD under the supervision of Prof Richard Morris and Dr Emma Wood, studying rodent behavioural models of learning and memory, specifically episodic memory and schema learning. Work from my PhD on the role of the hippocampus in a variety of these behavioural tasks has been published in Nature, Science and Hippocampus among other journals.  After completing my PhD in 2007 I left Scotland for Trondheim, Norway to join the laboratory of Professors Edvard and May-Britt Moser (Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory) and learn the technique of neuronal ensemble recording in awake behaving rats. I embarked on a project investigating the development of spatial firing properties of neurons in the hippocampus and entorhinal/parahippocampal cortices of baby rats. This work was published in Science in April 2010. Near the end of my postdoctoral project I was offered a permanent position at the University of Dundee as a Lecturer in Behavioural Neuroscience at the Division of Neuroscience, part of the newly formed Medical Research Institute. I have been there since February 2010.

Research Interest

I am currently working on two main research areas. The first is investigating the development of different types of memory in juvenile rats with a view to using this novel approach to characterise the neuronal signature of episodic memory, and to create age-appropriate models of developmental learning and memory disorders. Episodic memory is severely impaired in both elderly patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and in young patients following developmental brain injury (often sustained during birth). Identifying the neural circuits which underlie episodic memory is therefore at the forefront of neuropsychological research. The developing rodent model provides a unique opportunity to study the emergence of neural mechanisms of cognitive processing: preliminary evidence suggests that laboratory rodents show differential development of different memory subtypes, mirroring the slow development of memory in human infants. This project utilises behavioural testing, immediate early gene imaging and extracellular single neuron recordings from awake behaving rats, all of which are techniques currently established or being established in my Dundee laboratory. I have recently published the first paper from my independent laboratory, showing differential development of spatial vs. non-spatial memory in juvenile rats. The second research area is an industry funded Discovery Partnership with Academia(GlaxoSmithKline) in collaboration with Professors Jerry Lambert and Susann Schweiger (Division of Neuroscience) and Dr David Gray (Drug Discovery Unit) in which we are combining behavioural, electrophysiological and molecular genetics approaches to characterise cognitive and motor deficits in a mouse model of Huntington’s disease and develop therapeutic targets.