DrJeffrey Glennon

Our multidisciplinary research team investigates the role of cognitive and emotional control (rule making, rule breaking), in a number of psychiatric (obsessive compulsive disorder, autism, conduct disorder, psychopathy), somatic (type II diabetes, Romano-Ward Syndrome) and neurological (type 1 myotonic dystrophy) disorders. By encompassing both clinical and preclinical research, we aim to bridge the translational gap by performing matching studies with similar tasks or readouts (e.g. attention, reversal learning, MRI / 1H-MRS, transcriptomics) and cross-species interventions (e.g. pharmacology, neurochemistry). To ensure the integration is complete, we utilise a number of data integration and bioinformatics approaches on both clinical and preclinical data sets.

Our focus is on a series of interconnected brain circuits to and from the anterior and mid-cingulate cortex, other cortical sub cortical regions in mediating impulsivity / compulsivity, aggression, antisocial behaviour and decision making. Ultimately, we are interested in behavioural flexibility and the neural and molecular substrates underlying this to impact on human (clinical) phenotypes / traits. Our current research seeks in particular to develop and validate new behavioural tasks relevant to target discovery / validation. Mechanisms associated with insulin and GABAergic signalling are core to our current research programme.