Speaker: Seth Grant

Topic: “Madness, Genius and the Origin of the Brain”

Seth Grant graduated from Sydney University with a Bachelor of Science (Medicine) degree based on research in respiratory neurophysiology with Dr. D.J.C. Read in 1980.

He established his laboratory at the Centre for Genome Research at Edinburgh University in 1994 and in 2000 was appointed Professor of Molecular Neuroscience in the Division of Neuroscience. In 2003 he was appointed Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge and remained there until 2011, when he returned to Edinburgh University.

The long-term aim of his research at Edinburgh University is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of behaviour and how these mechanisms are involved in brain disease.

The research has focussed on the study of genes and proteins that control the synapses between nerve cells. Multiprotein machines comprising many different protein components are responsible for basic innate and learned behaviours and dysfunction in many brain diseases.