Biography:

Seth Grant graduated in Science, Medicine and Surgery from The University of Sydney. His first research was with Professor David Read in the Department of Physiology studying neurophysiological mechanisms of breathing and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. After his internship at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital he was a post-doctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and worked on genetic basis of cancer and diabetes, with Douglas Hanahan. In 1989 he worked with Eric Kandel (Nobel Laureate 2000) at Columbia University and New York State Psychiatric Institute. Here he studied the molecular and genetic basis of learning and memory. In 1994 he moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Molecular Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Neuroscience. He is currently at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute as a Principal Investigator, Honorary Professor at Cambridge University and directs the Genes to Cognition (G2C) research consortium (www.genes2cognition.org). His research is on the basic mechanisms of behaviour and the diseases of the brain.

Short summary of research interests:

My research interests are focussed on a set of proteins found in the postsynaptic compartment of excitatory synapse. This set of proteins is known as the NMDA receptor complex or MAGUK Associated Signaling Complex – NRC/MASC. The NRC/MASC is a prototype signaling complex in synapses and we study it using an integrated multidisciplinary strategy. The main tools we employ are mouse genetics, proteomics and bioinformatics. We have recently embarked on a study of synapse evolution that suggests the origins of the brain are in an ancestral protosynapse from unicellular animals and the increased complexity with evolution of metazoans and chordates underpins many of the features of the complex brain of humans.