Dr Miriam Matamales

Miriam co-leads, in partnership with Dr. Jay Bertran-Gonzalez, the group Neuromodulatory Systems and Behaviour (https://www.neuromodulab.org/) within the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory (https://www.decisioneurolab.com/).

Our team has a broad interest in Systems Neuroscience: we are particularly interested in studying how learning is encoded brain circuits, and how new behaviours that did not exist before imprint in neuronal circuits when they are generated, matured and adapted upon changes in environmental rules. We focus our studies on neuromodulatory systems (e.g. dopamine, acetylcholine, neuropeptides) supporting plasticity in subcortical brain networks (striatum, basal ganglia pathways), a central process for generating and modifying voluntary behaviours. We capitalise on animal learning theory, allowing us to design accurate behavioural paradigms that expose very specific forms of learning, and we deploy a series of quantitative fluorescence techniques as well as in vivo approaches to explore neuronal correspondence. Using mice as experimental model, the approach taken includes instrumental conditioning, AAV-based circuit- and cell-specific tracing and manipulation in behaving animals, in vivo photometry and computational analysis of behavioural and neuronal data. We are also interested in studying how these systems fail by modelling certain pathologies in mice such as age-associated motivational decline and behavioural control disorders.