James received his Master degree in Neuroscience from the University College London (UCL) having worked on the role of CYFIP1 in balancing excitation and inhibition at synapses under the supervision of Josef Kittler.

He then pursued a PhD at the University of Basel working with Jan Gründemann. During his PhD, he used deep brain calcium imaging in freely moving animals during a fear conditioning and extinction paradigm. He found that in auditory thalamus, there was plasticity on the single cell level but the population coding was stable.

James obtained his PhD in December 2021 and did not move very far to join the Brain and Sound lab as a postdoc in January 2022.

Publications

Taylor, J. A., Hasegawa, M., Benoit, C. M., Freire, J. A., Theodore, M., Ganea, D. A., Innocenti, S. M., Lu, T., Gründemann, J. (2021). Single cell plasticity and population coding stability in auditory thalamus upon associative learning. Nature Communications 2021 12:1, 12(1), 1–14.

Davenport, E. C., Szulc, B. R., Drew, J., Taylor, J., Morgan, T., Higgs, N. F., López-Doménech, G., Kittler, J. T. (2019). Autism and Schizophrenia-Associated CYFIP1 Regulates the Balance of Synaptic Excitation and Inhibition. Cell Reports, 26(8), 2037-2051.e6.