Profile

I grew up on a Greek island and I know how to make cheese, wine and produce olive oil. I now live in Edinburgh with my wife and my cat. When I’m not in the lab, I like to spend time in my garden, make up new recipes and watching nature documentaries. Hearing the opening theme from Planet Earth brings tears to my eyes.
This is my cat Nero. Friends tell me she looks like Toothless from ‘How to train your dragon’

I study how the brain changes as we grow up and how that affects the things we can learn and remember. I work with rats and I teach them things pretty much like you teach a dog to sit or bring the ball you throw back to you. All these different tricks require slightly different brain areas. So when I train my rats to do a trick (for example find their way in a maze or remember which objects the saw before) I can get a good idea is certain parts of their brain are working in the right way. Well it turns out that depending on how old a rat is, it can learn different tricks. With that knowledge we can predict which parts of the brain work and which don’t at different ages.

I spend most of my day playing with rats. I mainly show them different objects and then I see if they remember them and for how long.
The selves in my experiments’ room look like those in a kindergarten.

I also spend time analyse my data and speaking to other scientists. One of the coolest things in my job is to visit other placed in the world to attend conferences and learn experimental techniques. I’ve been to Japan, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and USA