Assistant Professor in Molecular Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences
Current Position
Previous Positions
Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience (convenor)
Fundamentals of Neuroscience
Animal Behaviour and Physiology
Higher Skills in the Biological Sciences
Research Projects (BSc and MSci)
My research is focused on several important ion channels of the nervous system including nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR), ionotropic glutamate receptors (IGR) and voltage-gated sodium… read more
My research is focused on several important ion channels of the nervous system including nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR), ionotropic glutamate receptors (IGR) and voltage-gated sodium channels and how their functioning is modulated by a variety of naturally occurring animal and plant toxins, drugs and pesticides. These compounds are excellent tools to study the structure and function of ion channels but also represent leads for the development of new drugs and pesticides and help us to understand problems such as pesticide resistance. Specific current interests are polyamine-containing toxins from solitary wasps, alkaloids from ladybirds, toxins from centipedes and pyrethroid insecticides. I am also interested in the development of multi-target directed ligands for Alzheimer's disease, in my case assessing their ability to inhibit NMDA receptor mediated calcium current.
The research is carried out using electrophysiological techniques including patch-clamp of neuronal cultures and cell lines, and voltage-clamp of Xenopus oocytes expressing the channels. Toxin structure-activity and ion channel protein mutation studies have enabled the identification of potent and selective antagonists and potentiators of these ion channels and their mechanisms and sites of action to be determined.
University of NottinghamMedical School Queen's Medical CentreNottingham NG7 2UH
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