Victoria Menne
Academic and Work Experience Prior to Sept 2022 Programme Start
I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the Technical University Braunschweig (Germany), where alongside my studies I worked as a student research assistant at the Department of Cellular Neurobiology. During this degree, both my thesis project in Prof Martin Korte’s lab and an extracurricular project in Prof Tim Karl’s lab at Western Sydney University focussed on behavioural neuroscience. I then went on to complete a Master’s degree in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht (The Netherlands) with a 10-month placement in Prof Vincenzo De Paola’s group at Imperial College London. Here, I had the chance to gain insight into modelling human neuron development in vivo using a xenotransplantation approach. Before starting the ATRM PhD program, I joined the Cells for Sight team led by Prof Julie Daniels at University College London as a research assistant manufacturing artificial ocular surface tissue under GMP conditions.
PhD Programme- Year 1- MRes and Project Rotations
Rotation 1 – The first rotation I completed under supervision of Dr Norah Fogarty at the Centre for Gene Therapy & Regenerative Medicine (CGTRM), focussing on deriving induced trophoblast stem cells from human embryonic stem cells by forward programming with modified mRNAs.
Rotation 2 – In the second rotation I joined Prof Benedikt Berninger’s lab at the Centre for Developmental Neurobiology (CDN) where I cultured human cerebral organoids to help test lineage reprogramming of astrocytes into induced neurons in the context of a 3D tissue environment.
Rotation 3 – For my third rotation I joined a collaboration between Dr Ivo Lieberam (CSCRM) and Prof Juan Burrone’s (CDN), where I used a human iPSC derived co culture system of cortical excitatory and inhibitory neurons to test mechanisms of homeostatic plasticity.
PhD Programme- Years 2 to 4 - Doctoral Studies
For my PhD project, I will be co-supervised by Prof Juan Burrone and Dr Ivo Lieberam, studying the subcellular balance between excitation and inhibition in Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Our brains have to constantly process and integrate new information, for which neurons communicate with each other via synaptic signalling. Neurons receive two types of input: excitatory signals that promote output, and inhibitory signals that prevent it. The integration of these two opposing forces is crucial for regulating the activity of any given neuron. On the level of neuronal networks, activity is kept stable by tightly controlled interaction of excitatory glutamatergic neurons and inhibitory GABAergic interneurons, resulting in Excitation/Inhibition (E/I) balance. Developing and maintaining a correct E/I balance is thought to be fundamental for appropriate circuit wiring and healthy function. Correspondingly, disruption of this balance is hypothesised to underly many neurological conditions, including epilepsy, schizophrenia and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Despite considerable research into E/I balance and its disturbance, we know little about how excitatory and inhibitory synapses are distributed across neurons at the subcellular level, or how the interaction between them influences neuronal output.
My project builds on recent work carried out in the Burrone lab where the dendritic distribution of excitatory and inhibitory synapses was mapped during early neurodevelopment in healthy mice. Working at the intersection of mouse and human models, I am aiming to characterize subcellular E/I balance in murine ASD models and eventually extend this approach to patient iPSC derived cortical neuron cultures.
