Dr Sam Cooke PhD

Biography

Learning and memory are critical for well-being. They have become defining issues of modern times because disturbances resulting from ageing or disease drastically impact quality of life and impose massive economic burdens on society. Our laboratory aims to understand fundamental cellular and circuit-level mechanisms of learning and memory, as well as to investigate the causes of aberrant learning and memory in neurodevelopmental disorders and dementia. Major goals are to identify useful biomarkers of brain dysfunction in these disorders and, ultimately, to develop novel treatments. I am also fully committed to providing a strong, research-led education about learning and memory to students at King’s College London. Among many other teaching roles, I currently serve as co-module lead on the popular 3rd year BSc module on ‘Memory Mechanisms in Health and Disease’.

Please see my  Research Staff Profile for more detail.

Key Publications:

• Kim et al., 2020. Opposing somatic and dendritic expression of stimulus-selective response plasticity in mouse primary visual cortex. Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.
• Fong et al., 2019. Distinct laminar requirements for NMDA receptors in experience-dependent visual cortical plasticity. Cerebral Cortex.
• Kaplan et al.,  2016. Contrasting Roles for Parvalbumin-Expressing Inhibitory Neurons in Two Forms of Adult Visual Cortical Plasticity. eLIFE
• Cooke et al., 2015. Visual Recognition Memory, Manifested as Long-Term Habituation, Requires Synaptic Plasticity in V1. Nature Neuroscience
• Cooke et al., 2010. Visual experience induces long-term potentiation in the primary visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience

View all publications

Key Collaborators:

• Professor Karl Peter Giese, King's College London
• Dr Alessio Delogu,  King's College London
• Dr Daniel Bendor, University College London
• Professor Mark Bear, Massachusetts Institute of Technology