People

Dr Yuki Kikuchi (Principal Investigator)

Yuki is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Faculty of Medical Sciences and a principal investigator of the Laboratory of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience at Newcastle University. She obtained her PhD in behavioural neuroscience in Japan and took a post-doc training under the mentorship of Dr Mortimer Mishkin at the Laboratory of Neuropsychology, NIMH/NIH in the USA.

She has +25 years of experience in primate work across four countries (USA, UK, Germany, Japan) and uses a variety of neuroscience approaches combined with electrophysiology, fMRI, optogenetics, neuroanatomy, genomics and computational modelling to understand the neural circuits of auditory cognition, aiming to advance treatment and intervention options for social cognitive disorders. 

Yuki is a British-Asian scientist from a minority ethnic background and is also a strong advocate for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI). She actively contributes to outreach events towards greater equality and bringing new possibilities and potentials among typically under-represented people.

SCIENTIFIC FOCUS

  • Neurobiology and Neural Circuits of Cognition: Advancing Treatment and Interventions for Neurological and Mental Health Disorders

RESEARCH FUNDING

  • 2025-2028 Co-Project Lead on MRC Understanding Public Involvement in Non-clinical Research grant. “Developing resources for public involvement in animal research”
  • 2024-2028 Principal Investigator on BBSRC-NSF/BIO Lead Agency US-UK partnership grant. “Neuronal mechanisms for auditory memory sequencing and prediction" 
  • 2024-2025 Principal Investigator on EPSRC-funded CloseNIT grant. “Closed-loop auditory stimulation to modulate amygdala-frontal synchrony in free-moving marmosets”
  • 2023-2027 Principal Investigator on MRC Programme grant. “Neuronal circuits for perceptual inference” 

RESEARCH EXPERIENCES

  • 2019-2020 Guest Researcher. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), NIH, USA
  • 2007-2011 Georgetown University Medical School, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, USA
  • 2007  Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany
  • 2002-2011 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), NIH, USA (2002-2004: JSPS Fellow)

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