Jill Williamson passes her PhD viva with flying colours

Tissue Repair student Jill Williamson successfully defends PhD thesis without receiving corrections.

Many congratulations to Jill Williamson on this extraordinary achievement. 

Jill did her PhD research in the lab of Prof Dave Lyons at the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, where she worked on remyelination using zebrafish as model organism.

Myelination is essential for normal nervous system development and function, and disruption of the myelin sheath and associated axons is associated with many human diseases, including Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

Jill's PhD project aimed to determine whether distinct neuron subtypes exhibit differences in how they regulate their myelination and remyelination. Jill was using zebrafish as a research model to follow the myelination of individual axons in real time, and performed manipulations on neuronal activity to see how this affects the myelination of individual axons. During her studies she compared distinct neuron subtypes to determine whether there are differences in how certain neurons use their electrical activity to regulate their myelination throughout life to gain a fuller understanding of how dynamic regulation of myelin affects lifelong circuit function.

To date, Jill's research has contributed to 4 publications, including 2 first author papers.

Publications by Jill Williamson

Almeida RG, Pan S, Cole KLH, Williamson JM, Early JJ, Czopka T, Klingseisen A, Chan JR, Lyons DA. (2018) Myelination of Neuronal Cell Bodies when Myelin Supply Exceeds Axonal Demand. Curr Biol. 28(8):1296-1305.e5.

Early JJ, Cole KL, Williamson JM, Swire M, Kamadurai H, Muskavitch M, Lyons DA. (2018) An automated high-resolution in vivo screen in zebrafish to identify chemical regulators of myelination. Elife. 7. pii: e35136.

Williamson JM, Lyons DA. (2018) Myelin Dynamics Throughout Life: An Ever-Changing Landscape? Front Cell Neurosci ;12:424. 

Williamson JM, Lyons DA, Almeida RG.Manipulating. (2019) Manipulating Neuronal Activity in the Developing Zebrafish Spinal Cord to Investigate Adaptive Myelination. Methods Mol Biol.;1936:211-225.