Place and Time: Abingdon, Thursday 18 July 2019 from 19:00 for 19:30

Due to renovation work at the KH & B our events will temporarily be happening at Old Magistrates Courtroom (OMC) in the Guildhall.

TITLE: Parkinson’s disease and dopamine: affecting motivation, movement and memory

Parkinson’s disease is a common brain disorder which affects about 1 in 350 adults in the UK. In Parkinson’s disease, a part of the brain becomes progressively damaged, which leads to a lack of a chemical called dopamine. The most well-known problems resulting from this lack of dopamine in Parkinson’s disease involve people’s movement, including slowness, tremors, stiffness, and difficulty with walking and balance. While these movement problems are very obvious, there are more subtle symptoms of Parkinson’s disease such as changes in memory or mood, which can also impact a person’s day-to-day life. Drugs that increase the amount of dopamine in the brain are used to treat the movement problems in Parkinson’s disease, but it is less clear how these drugs affect the cognitive symptoms.

We will present work looking at how movements, motivation, and memory may all become impaired by Parkinson’s disease, how dopamine medication may treat them, and what this can tell us about how dopamine might work in healthy brains too.

Speaker: John Grogan, Lisa Nobis, Tim Sandhu

Dr John Grogan completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of York, and his PhD in Neural Dynamics at the University of Bristol investigating how Parkinson’s disease and dopamine affect different forms of memory.

Lisa Nobis is a PhD student in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on changes in mood and motivation in Parkinson’s disease. Before coming to Oxford, Lisa completed an undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Groningen (2014), and a Research Master in Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Maastricht (2016).

Tim Sandhu completed his undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at University College London, and is due to start his PhD at the University of Oxford investigating the link between movement and motivation in Parkinson’s disease.

They are neuroscientists working at the University of Oxford, studying motivation and memory in Parkinson’s disease and other disorders.