PEOPLE
MARCUS STEPHENSON-JONES
Principal Investigator
Marcus Stephenson-Jones is a group leader at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre. He obtained his PhD from Sten Grillner’s lab at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, where he studied the evolution of the vertebrate brain. He then went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow in Bo Li’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he identified how a conserved subcortical circuit computes relative value by integrating information of opposing valence. His major research interest now is understanding the learning rules that govern how information is transformed into purposive action.
LARS ROLLIK
Postdoctoral Fellow
Lars focuses on dissecting the circuit architecture and function of the indirect pathway in the basal ganglia using techniques such as electrophysiological recordings and optogenetic manipulations. He is particularly interested in the neural computation of action parameters in the context of goal-directed behaviour.
OLE SYLTE
Postdoctoral Fellow
Ole is interested in how the brain converts spatial knowledge into flexible goal-directed decisions. His current work focuses on the hippocampal-accumbens circuit, asking how the nucleus accumbens transforms hippocampal spatial maps into navigational decisions. To study this, he combines dual Neuropixels recordings and optogenetics in freely moving mice with population-level analyses of large-scale neural data.
ALINA GUBANOVA
Graduate Student
I am interested in understanding how dopamine interacts with striatal circuits to support the learning and execution of stable behaviors. My work focuses on how movement-related dopamine signals reinforce actions and action sequences during learning, how habits emerge with practice, and how these signals are computed across different brain circuits.
HANNAH BULLOUGH
Research Assistant
CHRIS HALL
Graduate Student
Chris investigates how the basal ganglia enable flexible behaviour, with a focus on the distinct computational roles played by different striatal regions during goal-directed navigation. His work combines carefully designed behavioural paradigms with circuit-level manipulations and computational modelling to dissect how the brain adapts action selection to changing demands.
HAOYU LI
Research Assistant
Hannah studies the neural mechanisms of habit formation, asking why new tasks demand so much attention, and how practice eventually allows complex behaviours to run automatically, in parallel, with little conscious effort. Her work aims to uncover how the brain shifts control from deliberate, effortful processing to the fluid expertise of the expert.
Whether practising a dance, optimising your tennis serve, or learning how to tie a shoelace, difficult tasks become easy and stereotyped with practise. Haoyu is trying to understand how the basal ganglia function as a part of a distributed circuit to learn and execute motor sequences such as these.