Xander Lowe MINDS CDT, 2021

Doctoral Researcher, University of Southampton

Xander Lowe is a doctoral researcher working on how the brain processes and holds information in the short term. His project combines wet-lab electrophysiology, measuring the electrical activity of real neurons with in-silico modelling, where the same mechanisms are simulated in software. While computational neuroscience brings these approaches together as a field, the combination is not widely pursued at Southampton, giving Xander's work a distinctive position within the CDT.

The brain carries out something remarkable from an engineering perspective. It performs complex computation using very little energy, processing information directly where it is stored rather than shuttling it between separate memory and processing units. Understanding how this works in biological neurons could inform the design of artificial equivalents, AI hardware that is far more efficient than current systems.

From a medical perspective, the same models matter for understanding what goes wrong when brain circuits are disrupted. Xander's work on neuronal excitability is relevant to conditions including schizophrenia, where the balance of activity is altered in ways that affect memory and cognition.

His outputs to date include a poster presented at the Cambridge Ion Channel Forum on how NMDA receptor subunit composition shapes inhibition and persistent firing in prefrontal cortex models.

After his PhD, Xander plans to continue this work through postdoctoral research. He is due to graduate in 2027.