Geofrey O Phutietsile

Biography

I am interested in cells with excitable membranes (neurons) as well as pharmacology. The latter can affect the former in a big way.

2021-2025 

My PhD research covers geriatric pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacovigilance. I seek to design and build an anticholinergic burden scale that utilizes pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic data of drugs and then determine whether the new scale can be correlated with impaired mobility outcomes by using a large patient dataset from the International Resident Assessment Instrument (interRAI) n>15k. Current scales measuring anticholinergic burden are not thorough in their quantification of burden and give rise to a "hit and miss" result with regards their correlation with impaired mobility and or cognition. If you wish to read a summary of my research proposal on this subject matter, you can find a downloadable pdf copy on the left panel.

2019-2020

I conducted a project in computational neuroscience for my MRes program at the University of Leicester. I used extracellular electrophysiological recordings from the visual cortex of 19 mice each recorded over an average of 5.3hrs. The long electrode that was used for this spanned and recorded from all layers of the cortex. Now, 5.3 hrs is a really long time for neurons, so these long recordings where great to pick out any “infraslow” dynamics that may exist in the cortex’s system. There indeed existed some slow oscillating dynamic for the firing rates for example, with the rates increasing and decreasing with depth. To address the "rate vs spike-time" code aspect, I also had to probe if there were any interesting dynamics in the spike count variation of the spike trains…and for this I relied on a statistical quantity called the Fano-factor. Download adjacent PDF to read.

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Education/Qualifications:

• MRes Research Methods, (Computational) Neuroscience (University of Leicester)

• BSc (Hons) Neuroscience (University College London)

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