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PhD
PhD student projects range from the molecular basis of receptor and ion channel function, to cell signalling in epithelia, neurons and glia, metabolic and autonomic neuroscience, synaptic, circuits and systems neuroscience, and neural computation. Drug action is studied at molecular, cellular and systems levels, while diseases of aging such as Alzheimer’s Disease are a prominent part of our research activity.
What's it like to do a PhD in NPP?
Instead of learning things that are already well known, PhD students discover things that were previously unknown. So a PhD is less structured and less predictable than other academic qualifications. PhD students are often the most active and productive people in their research group, and we value them highly.
All NPP PhD students will have access to the UCL Doctoral Skills Development Programme (UCL DocSkills). This programme is designed to help you to expand your research and transferable skills in order to support your research, professional development and employability.
Successful PhD students will go on to join the active UCL Alumni Community. UCL currently has alumni living in 191 different countries worldwide.
Illustrations of PhD Student Work in NPP
Two-photon evoked images of capillaries in rat brain cortical slices before and after applying 72 nM Amyloid- (Aβ1-42), showing capillary constriction near pericytes. (basement membrane labelling with fluorescently tagged isolectin B4 (IB4)). Contributed by Ross Nortley, PhD student with David Attwell (DOI: 10.1126/science.aav9518).
Merged images of HA-tagged CaV2.2 calcium channels (green) and the peptide CGRP (red) in the dorsal horn of CaV2.2_HAKIKI mice. Region of interest depicted as white rectangle illustrates the gradation in intensity of staining between superficial and deep dorsal horn. Scale bar 200 μm. Contributed by Krishma Ramgoolam, PhD student with Profesor Annette Dolphin (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1811212115).
Merged images of a brain slice from a mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease labelled for Astrocytes (red) and Microglia (yellow), using Dapi (blue) to label nuclei and Amytracker (green) to label amyloid plaques). Scale bar 200 μm. Contributed by Karina Vitanova, PhD student with Profesor Frances Edwards.
Graduate students joining NPP will join a long and distinguished heritage of PhD study. The Research Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology has origins in the UCL medical school departments of Physiology, Pharmacology and Anatomy which made many contributions to the early development of these academic disciplines.
During the second half of the 20th Century, many important contributions to our fields of study were made by PhD students who began their careers at UCL. Among PhD students from the departments of Physiology and Pharmacology was Donald Jenkinson (Head of Pharmacology, 1983 to 1987) who was a PhD student in the 1950s with Sir Bernard Katz and made the first precise quantitative measurements of the affinity of tubocurarine for acetylcholine receptors of the neuromuscular junction (Jenkinson, 1960; doi: 10.1113/jphysiol.1960.sp006489).
Bernard Katz Portrait by Jenny Hersson-Ringskog
Later, with Dennis Haylett and Neil Castle he made precise measurements of the highly specific block of one class of potassium channels by the honey bee venom peptide, apamin (Castle, Haylett and Jenkinson, 1989, doi:10.1016/0166-2236(89)90137-9). He was a generous and kind Head of Department, (known as ‘the old walrus’ by some of the medical students on account of his bushy mustache).
Don Jenkinson
Paul Fatt was a remarkable PhD student in the Physiology department who studied neuromuscular transmission in the frog with Sir Bernard Katz during his PhD. Paul had studied Biochemistry at University of California Berkeley on the G.I. Bill after serving with the US Army during World War II.
In a Physiological Society memoir (Ashmore, 2014, An interview with Paul Fatt) he describes vividly arriving at UCL in the summer of 1948, having travelled by transatlantic liner from the United States, to find very few people in the department!
Murdoch Ritchie, Paul Fatt, Bernard Ginsborg, Douglas Wilkie
He was advised to go to Plymouth, where Katz and Hodgkin and Huxley were working together studying squid axon action potentials. There he met Katz and this led to the idea for his PhD, to use the new technique of recording membrane potential using glass microelectrodes to investigate synaptic transmission by studying the endplate potential in frog muscle. Observing the membrane potential recording, Fatt & Katz noticed that there were small blips in the membrane potential (about 1 mV in size) they described as ‘biological noise’.
Paul Fatt
Others might have overlooked the noise as perhaps due to vibration or originating from their home-made amplifier, but crucially, Fatt & Katz noted that the ‘noise’ was only observed when the microelectrode was inserted in the muscle fibre close to the point of contact between the nerve and the muscle. They had observed, for the first time, a nerve talking to a muscle! These spontaneous, sub-threshold events were due to the release of ‘quanta’ of neurotransmitter acetylcholine from the terminals of the motor nerve.
Paul Fatt’s PhD resulted in one of the most significant discoveries to be made in Physiology. Fatt & Katz published a brief report of their work in Nature in 1950 (doi: 10.1038/166597a0.), and a full paper in the Journal of Physiology in 1952 (DOI: 10.1113/jphysiol.2006.122143).
The illustration shows original membrane potential recordings from endplate of frog extensor digitorum longus muscle. Panel A, with electrode inserted at the endplate; Panel B, inserted 2 mm away. Panel C, Paul Fatt photographed in 1989; Panel D, Paul’s PhD supervisor, Sir Bernard Katz. In a long and distinguished career in the Biophysics Department at UCL, Paul Fatt went on to make fundamental discoveries on excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission, on muscle properties and identified voltage-gated calcium currents.
