Professor David Bilkey

Professor David Bilkey's general research area is systems neuroscience, with a particular focus on the role of the temporal cortex regions of the brain in memory and learning processes.

Professor Bilkey received a PhD from the University of Otago in 1987. After working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, in 1988 he returned to Otago as a lecturer. He is a past recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, has served on several major funding panels and is actively involved in promoting science in schools. Currently, he is the Director of the Brain Health Research Centre.

Recently, he has been using an animal model of schizophrenia to investigate how the function of the hippocampus is altered in this disorder. He is looking at the biological basis of memory by “tagging” episodic memories attached to particular moments and noting how the brain encodes an episodic memory. His lab has focused on the hippocampal region of the brain, which appears to process “where” information and the neighbouring perirhinal cortex, which appears to encode “what”. Given there is connectivity between the hippocampus and this neighbouring cortex, they have hypothesised that an episodic memory is created when hippocampal-based place information is combined with perirhinal-based object information.

How the brain combines information from different locations to form a coherent memory is a logical next step for research. Professor Bilkey proposes that the prefrontal cortex has a role in integrating this information with prior experience and motivation and he is currently testing this hypothesis using a variety of behavioral and electrophysiological techniques.

These projects will help clarify how the brain melds place and object information, which is distributed across different brain areas, into a coherent memory. At a higher level, it will inform us as to why place information seems to be such an important component of episodic memory. His research is funded by the Health Research Council and Marsden Fund.

Find out more about Professor Bilkey's research.