John Butler

Biography

My eight years of basic and translational research combined at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tuebingen, Germany) and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York, USA) with my Ph.D. in Numerical Methods from Trinity College Dublin gives me a unique set of skills and ideas when approaching Neural Engineering and Neuroscience research questions.

Research Interest

My research is focused on investigating how the brain processes sensory and multisensory cues in clinical and non-clinical populations. To do this I design novel experimental protocols and adapt/build experimental equipment to acquire behavioural and neurophysiological data. I devise advanced signal processing methods to analyze and interpret these rich and complex datasets. I have used this data to develop biologically plausible and computational elegant models that describe the integration of sensory signals. As a Senior Research Fellow I will extend these models to make predictions of abhorrent sensory signal processing that has been observed in clinical populations. These modelsare tested and help bridge the gap between theoretical hypothesis and experimental data which is vital to further our understanding of normal and abnormal sensory processing. This will be conducted in collaboration with my research partners who investigate Dystonia (Prof Michael Hutchison, St. Vincent's University Hospital) and Parkinson's disease (Prof. Tim Lynch, Mater Hospital)