Biography: 

Michael O’Shea is Professor of Neuroscience and co-Director of the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in the UK.  Before taking up his present position he was Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago in the USA.  He held Research Fellowships at the University of Cambridge and the University of California at Berkeley.  He is author of more than 100 scholarly articles on cellular, molecular and computational neuroscience and biologically inspired robotics.  In the interests of the public understanding of science (and the scientist’s understanding of the public) he authored “The Brain – A Very Short Introduction” published by Oxford University Press.  He is a keen amateur astronomer and an armchair philosopher. 

Research Interests:

I am interested in figuring out how the brain works.  While in pursuit of this arguably unattainable goal, I have not constrained myself to any single system or methodology.  That said, I have prioritised the simplest systems that are capable of shining light on some of the most puzzling properties of the most complex brain of all - namely the one residing in your head (and my own). This catholic approach to interdisciplinary neuroscience has led me from animal behaviour to cellular mechanisms of neuronal plasticity, gene regulation in neurons and on to computational modelling and robotics.