Beth and her new project

This month we welcome Beth Routley to join us as a postdoctroal fellow. After her successful PhD, Beth has done an amazing job as the Public Outreach Officer at CUBRIC, promoting Brain Games and other engagement events. Now the opportunity comes to have her inputs on an exciting project.

Beth will study data from a large group of patients with epilepsy. During epilepsy surgery evaluation, several electrodes have been implanted deep in patients’ brain, and brain activity has been recorded before and during seizure. She will first examine how seizures arise from small brain regions, using mathematical models of neural networks that describe the changes of brain cells and their connections over time. Next, She will use the parameters of the models to simulate brain activity, and validate our method by comparing simulations with the real patients’ data. Our novel analysis may lead on to new therapeutic and surgical strategies for controlling seizures and eventually enhance the quality of life of epileptic patients.