Aidan Mason-Mackay: A physicist’s journey to the Neuro-Innovation Phd Programme

My name is Aidan, and I am a new Neuro-Innovation PhD researcher, originally from New Zealand. I’m a physicist, and my PhD will focus on the development of brain imaging techniques to help us better understand how memories are formed.

My passion for physics was sparked by my brilliant high school teachers, who encouraged me to compete in the International Young Physicists’ Tournament (IYPT). For the IYPT, high schoolers are challenged to investigate open-ended physics problems, and to defend their research in open debate. We worked on problems like “build a vehicle which can be powered only by sound” and “design, explain, and optimise a string telephone”. These competitions brought textbook science to life for me, and ultimately steered me towards pursuing my undergraduate degree in maths and physics.

After graduation, I worked briefly for a start-up company which was researching imaging methods for disease detection in grape vines. Image reconstruction is part of a family of problems known as ‘Inverse Problems’, and this was my first encounter with them. Inverse problems have deep mathematical foundations, and they’re ubiquitous in industry. I was so fascinated by them, that I decided to go back to university to pursue post-graduate study in this field.

After post-graduation, I began working for another science-based start-up company which specialised in microfluidic technology for sorting biological cells. In my role, I developed simulations or ‘digital twins’ to mimic the physics of phenomena we saw in the lab. This work comes under the umbrella of ‘Computational Physics’, another field that I love for its deep foundations in maths and physics, and for its applicability throughout industry.

My PhD project

I’m now excited to begin this next chapter as a Neuro-Innovation PhD researcher. This position offers the opportunity to explore a new area of science, while continuing to develop my skills in inverse problems and computational physics.

My PhD is part of a project at the University of Eastern Finland which aims to better understand memory consolidation, i.e. the process where memories are moved from short to long-term storage. This process happens during sleep, and we hope to learn more about it through functional MRI of sleeping rats. There are three tricky aspects of this that we will address in my PhD work:

• The memory consolidation events don’t last long (<1 second),
• We can’t predict when the events will occur,
• The rats need to sleep in the scanner, so our imaging method needs to be quiet.

We’re addressing these three hurdles using a combination of novel imaging protocols and mathematical techniques. I’m just at the start of this work and looking forward to seeing what we discover.

Aidan Mason-Mackay works as a doctoral researcher in the Neuro-Innovation PhD programme.