Modelling brain dynamics across the lifespan

Suitable for PhD or Honours students. This project would suit students with a background in physics, maths, or a related discipline, and an interest in computational neuroscience, with some experience in programming (e.g., in MATLAB).

A major challenge for neuroscience is to understand how the brain’s densely interconnected network of neurons—the “connectome”—gives rise to the rich repertoire of brain activity. The overarching aim of this project is to reveal how complex patterns of neural activity emerge from the connectome across the lifespan. This will entail using a novel combination of cutting-edge large-scale modelling of brain dynamics and state-of-the-art neuroimaging data (both structural and functional). There will be numerous applications depending on interests, examples include:

• How ageing brain structure changes our brain activity.
• How non-invasive brain stimulation perturbs brain network activity.
• How disorders such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, or ADHD may emerge from biologically-plausible changes to model parameters.
• Modelling sleep dynamics.
• Developing novel analysis methods for complex spatiotemporal dynamics.