University of Ulster

Computational Neuroscience Research Team

One of the most important scientific challenges of the 21st century is to understand the biological brain. This challenge entails knowledge of brain structure, function and dynamics on many different levels all the way from molecules to neurons up to networks and beyond. How the various parts of the brain interact dynamically to produce cognition and behavior is still an unsolved problem. Understanding the brain has significant implications for society ranging from industry and commerce to  education and healthcare. For example, clinical depression, age related dementia and Alzheimer's disease are major societal problems that affect millions of people worldwide, with substantial economic cost and catastrophic impact on both sufferers and caregivers.  Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia, affecting more than 5 million people in Europe and  predicted to increase to 106 million by 2050. In parallel, a recent economic review put the total cost of depression to the economy of England in the year 2000 at over £9 billion. Clearly understanding the normal and dysfunctional brain is critically important for the  development of effective drugs and therapies as well as ways to enhance and preserve cognitive and brain function.

The brain is a complex system consisting of about 100 billion neurons. A massive amount of data from many different sources on many different levels is now available in part due to advanced measurement techniques and evermore sophisticated technology. The computer has become an indispensible tool for acquiring, analyzing and mining data. In turn, theoretical and computational modeling offers a way to organize new data and extract meaningful information. Theoretical modeling is also necessary to generate experimentally testable hypotheses about how the brain works, and thus is a crucial accompaniment to data collection. Computational neuroscience is a new field of study that uses biologically-based modeling and simulation to uncover the principles and mechanisms that underlie how the brain performs cognitive functions and produces overt behavior.

The Computational Neuroscience Research Team (CNRT) is a recent initiative of the Intelligent Systems Research Centre. The project is funded under the Northern Ireland Department for Employment and Learning, through its "Strengthening the all-Island Research Base" initiative. CNRT brings together a substantial team of talented researchers dedicated to computational modeling of the nervous system and the information processing functions it performs. Although CNRT's research is grounded in basic neuroscience, a long term goal is multi-scale modeling of cognitive disorder and specific clinical conditions such as clinical depression and Alzheimer's disease. The aim is to develop accurate computational models of brain regions and their associated circuitry, especially those known to be affected during the course of depression and AD. Such models are critical also for studies of the neural dynamics of development, learning and aging including neurodegenerative processes.