Brief Biography
Alex Thomson is the Welcome Professor of Pharmacology at the School of Pharmacy, University of London. She studied for her first degree in physiology at Bedford College, University of London (1975) and her Ph.D. in the Physiology Department, Bristol University (1978) working on the neuromuscular junction. In 1980 she moved to Oxford University Laboratory of Physiology with a Beit Memorial Fellowship. Here she began studies of synaptic physiology and pharmacology in neocortical slices and, with her long-term collaborator David West, was the first to demonstrate that NMDA receptors do indeed mediate normal excitatory synaptic events. Following her move to Cardiff University as a Welcome Lecturer in 1985, the dual intracellular recordings that have become the hallmark of the lab began. In 1988 Alex moved to the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, where Jim Deuchars introduced biocytin-labeling and detailed studies of neuronal and synaptic morphology to the group. Alex held a Research Chair in Neurophysiology in the newly merged Royal Free and University College Medical School from 1998 until she moved to the School of Pharmacy in 2002 where she was head of the Department of Pharmacology until 2007. The major interests of her group continue to be the functional synaptic circuitry of cortical regions and the pre- and post-synaptic mechanisms that underlie the vast diversity of synaptic properties across different classes of connections in neocortical and hippocampal circuits.