Welcome to our two new Chancellor's Fellows
Sept 2020: We would like to extend our congratulations and a warm welcome to new Chancellor's Fellows who have joined CCBS over the last few months: Dr Tim Czopka and Dr Bhuvaneish T Selvaraj.
Dr Tim Czopka
Tim has spent his academic career to date between Germany and Edinburgh. He obtained his PhD in Neuroscience from Ruhr-University Bochum and undertook postdoctoral research at Edinburgh with Prof Charles ffrench-Constant before becoming a Principal Investigator in 2015 at the Technical University of Munich. He relocated with his research group back to Edinburgh in April 2020 (at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic!) to take up his Chancellor's Fellow position.
Tim's research aims to understand how oligodendrocytes communicate with neurons, and how these interactions affect the brain. To address this, he uses zebrafish as a model organism and a wide range of complementary methods including high-resolution optical microscopy of live cell reporters, optophysiology and biomolecular sensor imaging, cellular genetic manipulations, and behavioural analysis.
Dr Bhuvaneish T Selvaraj
Bhuvaneish is an engineering graduate from Anna University, India. He has been at the University of Edinburgh since 2014, initially as a postdoc working in Professor Siddharthan Chandran's lab on stem cell disease modelling of neurodegenerative diseases. In 2020 he was awarded a Chancellor's fellowship jointly sponsored by the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic and the UK Dementia Research Institute at Edinburgh.
Now Bhuvaneish is establishing his own research group with the overarching aim of deciphering the molecular pathomechanisms leading to the selective vulnerability of motor neurons in motor neuron disease (MND). To achieve this he uses cutting-edge technologies like human stem cell modelling including 3D organoid models, CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, electrophysiology and human post-mortem studies.
Bhuvaneish is also a Principal Investigator of the Euan MacDonald Centre for Motor Neuron Disease Research, a Scotland-wide hub for all research into MND.
Bhuvaneish T Selvaraj's profile
Related links
Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic
UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh
Euan MacDonald Centre for Motor Neuron Disease Research