Professor Scott Waddell Named Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Sciences

Pembroke Senior Research Fellow Professor Scott Waddell has been appointed a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Sciences.

Principal Research Fellowships are described by the Wellcome Trust as the ‘most prestigious’ of their personal awards, presented to academics of international esteem in order to support them with long-term funding.

The fellowship will be used to aid Prof. Waddell’s research into understanding neural network mechanisms of behavioural control, using the fruit fly, Drosophila. Recent discoveries from his group include the identification and functional subdivision of rewarding dopaminergic neurons, the finding that other dopaminergic neurons provide hunger- or thirst-dependent motivational control of food and water-seeking memory retrieval, and the localisation of synaptic junctions where memory is represented and from which expression appears to be controlled.

Prof. Waddell commented: 'I am hugely grateful to the Wellcome Trust for their continued support of my research programme. The funds from the PRF will allow us to continue to push our research boundaries and to be as creative as possible. Although this award is made to me, it really reflects the tremendous progress made over the last ten years by the many talented people that I am lucky to have had in my lab.'

Prof. Waddell is a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Oxford and a Group Leader and Vice-Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, an autonomous research unit within the Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Genetics at the University of Oxford.