Research summary

I am a doctor training in neurosurgery. Broadly, I am interested in understanding why inflammatory responses to acute brain injury vary between people and how these impact on long-term clinical outcome. This is important to inform patient selection for surgery and may allow targeted therapeutic development. 

Current interests

Towards my PhD, I am developing in vitro and in vivo models of brain haemorrhage to investigate how microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain, modulate astrocyte and neuronal responses to haemorrhage. By accessing brain tissue and clinical data kindly donated by patients who have died following haemorrhage we will identify which disease modifying factors are translatable to human disease. My PhD is supervised by Prof. Giles Hardingham, Dr. Barry McColl and Prof. Rustam Salman and is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/james-jm-loan

https://www.ed.ac.uk/discovery-brain-sciences/our-staff/phd-student/james-loan

I work within the following research groups at the University of Edinburgh:

• Hardingham group at the UK Dementia Research Institute
• McColl group at the UK Dementia Research Institute
• Research to Understand Stroke due to Haemorrhage group