Cerebellar Learning

Professor Ramnani received his PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience from the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at University College London (UCL). He also holds a BSc (Hons) in Psychology from Birkbeck College London, and an MSc in Neuroscience from the Institute of Psychiatry (London). His postdoctoral training took place at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (Institute of Neurology, UCL), the University Laboratory of Physiology and the Centre for fMRI of the Brain (FMRIB) at the University of Oxford. After his postdoctoral training he was appointed to a Lectureship in the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is Professor of Neuroscience. Cerebellar learning and plasticity are central to Professor Ramnani’s core research interests. He has attempted to integrate behavior, neurobiology and theory to understand cerebellar contributions to learning. This approach began as a PhD student when he studied a simple, cerebellar-dependent form of motor learning in animals. Since then his interests have expanded to include the roles of frontal lobe areas in cognition and action. His work has also built on the finding that the cerebellum communicates with multiple areas in the frontal lobe that include not only the cortical motor areas, but also the prefrontal cortex. His research group has used neuroimaging methods to understand the anatomical organization and evolution of prefrontal-cerebellar circuits, and the manner in which they communicate to support to the automation of cognitive operations. Professor Ramnani’s work is supported by research grants from a number of sources including the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). He has published in a range of specialist and high profile journals including Nature Neurscience, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Journal of Neuroscience. For the last ten years he has been actively engaged in promoting UK neuroscience as a Council and Committee member of the British Neuroscience Association.