Emma Wood graduated with a 1st class Honours degree in Psychology from the University of St Andrews before going to Canada on a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. She then spent 6 years in the USA as a postdoc - first in the lab of Janis Weeks at the University of Oregon, studying neural mechanisms of non-associative learning in the caterpillar Manduca sexta, and next in the lab of Howard Eichenbaum at Boston University,investigating how hippocampal place cells contribute to memory. She was recruited to a Lectureship in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh in 1999, and now holds a Personal Chair in Behavioural Neuroscience in the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences and Simons Foundation for the Developing Brain at the University of Edinburgh.

To be added

Neural circuit mechanisms of spatial cognition and memory

• Understanding the role of head direction cells in spatial cognition, and their contribution to the spatial activity of place, grid and boundary cells
• Dissecting the neural circuitry for landmark memory (focusing on specific entorhinal-hippocampal circuits)
• Understanding the contributions of medial and lateral entorhinal cortex to memory, spatial cognition, and to hippocampal codes
• Understanding the neural circuitry that supports episodic memory, and how it changes during postnatal development

Translational Research

• Behavioural and circuit-level characterisation of rat models of intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorders (e.g. Fragile X Syndrome)
• Prevention/reversal of behavioural and circuit-based deficits in rat models of intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorders

My core teaching is to Biomedial Sciences and Medical Sciences undergraduate students, with a focus on Neuroscience, and to postgraduate students on the MSc Integrative Neuroscience programme.

Current Undergraduate teaching: Neuroscience 3, Neural Circuits for Learning and Memory (Hons elective), supervision of Honours projects.

Current Postgraduate teaching: MSc Integrative Neuroscience, supervision of MSc projects.