Lucy palmer

Laboratory Head

Lucy received a B.A and B.Sc from the University of Melbourne and M.Sc from the University of Minnesota. She obtained her Ph.D from the Australian National University and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland and the Charite University, Berlin. She returned to Australia in 2013 to head the Neural Networks Laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. 

lucy.palmer@florey.edu.au
+61 3 9035 6022

Marius Rosier

Postdoc — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2018
marius.rosier@gmail.com

Marius obtained his PhD at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CNRL), France. His doctoral thesis research was focused on the role of REM sleep on emotional regulation and on remote consolidation of memory. He enjoyed the irony of sleep depriving himself to write about how bad sleep deprivation is. Then he was kicked out from France for not liking red wine nor cheese and joined the Palmer Lab to study dendritic integration in cells recruited during learning (engram cells) in the auditory cortex, in collaboration with the Ryan lab (Trinity College, Dublin). To address this he will be using ex vivo electrophysiology and two-photon calcium imaging in vivo. Loves drinking mate (you know, the beverage... could be “loves drinking, mate !”, which is also true, but not the point) and bike travel when it`s time to flee.

Oh, come on!

Tongrui Qian

Postdoc — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Heifei Guan

Postdoc — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Sean Murphy

PhD Student / Research Assistant — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2013
sean.murphy@florey.edu.au

Sean received his B.Com from Charles Sturt University and was a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland and the Charite University, Berlin. He is interested in how neural activity is modulated by drugs of addiction and to address this, Sean uses electrophysiology and calcium imaging in vivo.

Rei Masuda

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2018
rmasuda@student.unimelb.edu.au

Rei received his B.Sc from University of Melbourne. He is interested in the role of Prefrontal Cortex in perception (as well as other functions), and thus will be investigating the effect that the thalamic input from the POm has on the mPFC using a sensory-reward based behavioural task.

Heidi Mcalpine

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2020

Heidi completed her BSc(hons), MBBS and DipSurgAnat at the University of Melbourne. She plans to forge a career as a surgeon/scientist and is currently taking a break from neurosurgery training to undertake a PhD in the Palmer Laboratory. Heidi was awarded the Warren Haynes Fellowship from the Neuroscience Foundation and the Melbourne University Research Training Program Scholarship to undertake her research, which will further characterise the newly discovered neuronal-glioma synapse using patch clamping on ex-vivo human tumour. Combining her two favourite things (travel and neurosurgery), Heidi travels to Africa each year to lead the Pangea Medical Student Program, which upskills local medical trainees in low-income countries in the fundamentals of patient care. Heidi claims her decision to become a brain surgeon was independent of her quest to one up her rocket scientist husband, contrary to his opinion on the matter.

Ann-Sofie Bjerre

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2017
Ann-sofie.Bjerre@florey.edu.au

Ann-Sofie was born and raised in Denmark but left her country after ending her (short) career as a rock musician, in pursuit of becoming a neuroscientist. She has a B.Sc in Biochemistry from University of Copenhagen and did her Master of Biomedical Science at University of Melbourne, in Palmer Laboratory. She is now doing a PhD at University of Tasmania, but as a collaboration between Lin Group at UTAS and Palmer Laboratory at The Florey, where she is investigating the flow of information during learning of a discrimination task using widefield calcium imaging, while also testing new optogenetic tools for manipulation of cortical activity. Ann-Sofie is bubbly and talks a lot (she was once a part of a study where the participants had to talk non-stop for 30 minutes… she went over time with no interruptions).

Nothing is ever so bad it’s not good for something — Danish saying

Liam Leyden

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2018
lleyden@student.unimelb.edu.au

Liam completed his B.Sc at the University of Melbourne majoring in Neuroscience. As a part of his Master of Biomedical Scinece Liam is looking at the nature of projections from the prefrontal cortex to the somatosensory cortex with the goal of finding out influences the prefrontal cortex has on cortex function during behaviour.

Serena Wang

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2020

Serena received her B.BMed degree from the University of Melbourne in 2019, and has joined Palmer Lab to complete her master’s degree. She will be investigating the role of neuromodulation in dendritic processes of cortical pyramidal cells in human and rodent using ex vivo electrophysiology. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, painting and learning new things. She always thinks that investing time in learning something new is rewarding. If possible, she usually sleeps around 12 hours a day and she can confirm that memory consolidation indeed takes place during sleep.

Elena Regele Blasco

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2020

Elena grew up in Spain, but her love for travelling took her to Scotland, where she graduated in Neuroscience with a B.Sc with honours from the University of Dundee. Missing the sun, she moved to Australia, where she completed a master’s degree at the University of Melbourne and is now doing a PhD. Outside of the lab, she enjoys hiking, reading and anything food related.

Yi Hu

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2021

Yi was born in Fenghua, a small city on the east coast of China. Playing video games was the most intellectual challenge he encountered in this city. Learning computer science at the university in Hangzhou enabled him to design hard-core challenges in videos games for others. However, when he was in Shanghai, he found his curiosity could not be fed enough unless he picked up his dream which was planted in his hometown - studying the brain. He was then trained in B.Sc at the University of Melbourne and started B.Biomed (Hons) in 2021. He is now looking at brains through two-photon microscopy and investigating dendritic changes in S1 during extinction learning. Besides that, he is a certified chef who likes cooking all types of cuisine.

Xiaoyu Wang

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2021

Xiaoyu completed his B.Biomed at the University of Melbourne majoring in neuroscience in 2020. During his master degree, he will be looking for the neural basis of learning and memory with Marius Rosier in terms of finding engram cells and understanding role of engram cells in memory recall. In his spare time, he loves to play guitar and draw.

Eleonora regolo

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Eleonora was born in the south of Italy where she completed a B.Sc in Medical Biotechnology with honours. After she completed her Master of Neurobiology at University of Pavia, she moved to the Netherlands for a one year Traineeship at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. The search of engram cells brought her to Australia, where she is doing her PhD. She will be exploring the activation and role of engram cells during learning. In her spare time she loves to cook Italian traditional food and sneaking around flea markets.

Lena Kricsfalussy-Hrabár

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Lena grew up in Germany, where she studied Biology at the RWTH University in Aachen. She received her B. Sc. and M. Sc. there, both focussing on neuroscience and medical life sciences. Always wanting to live abroad for a while, she ended up on the other side of the world for her PhD. She will be using two-photon imaging to study memory storage in the cortex, looking at perirhinal input to frontal areas. In case it doesn’t work out, her childhood life goal of moving to the countryside and becoming a famous novelist remains her plan B, although nowadays, she prefers the city.

Jay Kim

Masters Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2022

Jay is from Goyang, a residential city in South Korea. Jay's childhood dream was to become a novelist, but life had other plans for her. Instead of writing stories, she studied BBiomedSc/BECSE at Monash University, and later found herself writing software programs and doing translation work, which she admits has been a pretty fun ride so far. In her master’s, Jay will be exploring the enigmatic world of simultaneous activity and its relationship with learning.

Jacob Hannah

Masters Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2022

Rosie Firth

Masters Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2022

Nel

Masters Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Sam Combes

Honours Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Completing his B.Sc at The University of Melbourne with a major in Neuroscience, Sam will attempt to solve all of life’s mysteries in his B.BMed (Hons) year. (Plus, he will also be looking at pre-frontal cortex neuromodulation of the auditory cortex during locomotion in mice). Sam can solve a Rubik’s cube in under 2 mins, can translate morse code, and has a fascination for the brain . When he isn’t in the lab, he loves a cheeky hike, some acoustic guitar, and a bit of surfing.

Weaknesses: Dad jokes that are so bad they are somehow funny
Strengths: Dad jokes that are so bad they are somehow funny

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. — Albert Einstein