The Galway Neuroscience Centre are pleased to welcome two new academic members to the Centre, Dr Robert Munn and Dr Lieve Desbonnet. Both Rob and Lieve have joined the Discipline of Pharmacology & Therapeutics, and we wish them well with their new roles!
Dr Robert Munn
Rob Munn joins the Discipline of Pharmacology from California. Originally from Auckland, New Zealand, Rob did his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand with Professors Neil McNaughton and David Bilkey. Rob then moved to Stanford University in the San Francisco bay area in 2013 to do postdoc work with Assoc. Prof. Lisa Giocomo.
Rob is an in vivo behavioural electrophysiologist, with a side-interest in in vivo Calcium imaging. He studies learning and memory in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortices and is currently working with a Down syndrome mouse model.
Dr Lieve Desbonnet
Lieve Desbonnet is from Galway and is currently a lecturer in the department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics in NUIG. Before this she worked as a lecturer in Neuroscience in the University of Glasgow for four years, and received her PhD in Neuroscience from University College Cork in 2007, after completing a BSc in Anatomy, and an MSc in Neuropharmacology in NUIG.
Lieve’s research focusses on investigating the long-term effects of adverse environmental events in early life, stress, immune activation, and alterations in gut microbiota, on brain development and behaviour. In her early career she spent a year as a Marie Curie fellow in Maastricht University in 2003. Following her PhD, she continued her research work in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) developing gene-environment models for schizophrenia, and a further 2 years as a senior postdoctoral researcher focussing on the role of the gut microbiota in neurodevelopment and behaviour. Currently she works as part of the iRELATE project that examines the role of the immune system in cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia.