Lucy palmer

Laboratory Head

Lucy received a B.A and B.Sc from the University of Melbourne and M.Sc from the University of Minnesota. She obtained her Ph.D from the Australian National University and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland and the Charite University, Berlin. She returned to Australia in 2013 to head the Neural Networks Laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. 

lucy.palmer@florey.edu.au
+61 3 9035 6022

Marius Rosier

Postdoc — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2018
marius.rosier@gmail.com

Marius obtained his PhD at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CNRL), France. His doctoral thesis research was focused on the role of REM sleep on emotional regulation and on remote consolidation of memory. He enjoyed the irony of sleep depriving himself to write about how bad sleep deprivation is. Then he was kicked out from France for not liking red wine nor cheese and joined the Palmer Lab to study dendritic integration in cells recruited during learning (engram cells) in the auditory cortex, in collaboration with the Ryan lab (Trinity College, Dublin). To address this he will be using ex vivo electrophysiology and two-photon calcium imaging in vivo. Loves drinking mate (you know, the beverage... could be “loves drinking, mate !”, which is also true, but not the point) and bike travel when it`s time to flee.

Oh, come on!

Hefei Guan

Postdoc — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Hefei completed her master’s degree in neuroscience at Waseda University in Japan, and was awarded a PhD degree from Waseda University and Riken Center for Brain Science in 2021. Following the completion of her doctoral studies, she undertook a postdoctoral study in the same lab and then joined Lucy Palmer’s lab at the Florey since 2023. During her doctoral research, Hefei focused on exploring the functional lateralization of hippocampal circuit. Her work involved recording neural activity using in vivo electrophysiology techniques. Her research in the Palmer lab focuses on investigating the electrophysiological properties of human gliomas and neurons, utilizing the in vitro patch clamp technique. 

Liam Leyden

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2018
lleyden@student.unimelb.edu.au

Liam completed his B.Sc at the University of Melbourne majoring in Neuroscience. As a part of his Master of Biomedical Scinece Liam is looking at the nature of projections from the prefrontal cortex to the somatosensory cortex with the goal of finding out influences the prefrontal cortex has on cortex function during behaviour.

Serena Wang

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2020

Serena received her B.BMed degree from the University of Melbourne in 2019, and has joined Palmer Lab to complete her master’s degree. She will be investigating the role of neuromodulation in dendritic processes of cortical pyramidal cells in human and rodent using ex vivo electrophysiology. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, painting and learning new things. She always thinks that investing time in learning something new is rewarding. If possible, she usually sleeps around 12 hours a day and she can confirm that memory consolidation indeed takes place during sleep.

Elena Regele Blasco

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2020

Elena grew up in Spain, but her love for travelling took her to Scotland, where she graduated in Neuroscience with a B.Sc with honours from the University of Dundee. Missing the sun, she moved to Australia, where she completed a master’s degree at the University of Melbourne and is now doing a PhD. Outside of the lab, she enjoys hiking, reading and anything food related.

Yi Hu

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2021

Yi was born in Fenghua, a small city on the east coast of China. Playing video games was the most intellectual challenge he encountered in this city. Learning computer science at the university in Hangzhou enabled him to design hard-core challenges in videos games for others. However, when he was in Shanghai, he found his curiosity could not be fed enough unless he picked up his dream which was planted in his hometown - studying the brain. He was then trained in B.Sc at the University of Melbourne and started B.Biomed (Hons) in 2021. He is now looking at brains through two-photon microscopy and investigating dendritic changes in S1 during extinction learning. Besides that, he is a certified chef who likes cooking all types of cuisine.

Xiaoyu Wang

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2021

Xiaoyu completed his B.Biomed at the University of Melbourne majoring in neuroscience in 2020. During his master degree, he will be looking for the neural basis of learning and memory with Marius Rosier in terms of finding engram cells and understanding role of engram cells in memory recall. In his spare time, he loves to play guitar and draw.

Eleonora regolo

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Eleonora was born in the south of Italy where she completed a B.Sc in Medical Biotechnology with honours. After she completed her Master of Neurobiology at University of Pavia, she moved to the Netherlands for a one year Traineeship at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. The search of engram cells brought her to Australia, where she is doing her PhD. She will be exploring the activation and role of engram cells during learning. In her spare time she loves to cook Italian traditional food and sneaking around flea markets.

Lena Kricsfalussy-Hrabár

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Lena grew up in Germany, where she studied Biology at the RWTH University in Aachen. She received her B. Sc. and M. Sc. there, both focussing on neuroscience and medical life sciences. Always wanting to live abroad for a while, she ended up on the other side of the world for her PhD. She will be using two-photon imaging to study memory storage in the cortex, looking at perirhinal input to frontal areas. In case it doesn’t work out, her childhood life goal of moving to the countryside and becoming a famous novelist remains her plan B, although nowadays, she prefers the city.

Sam Combes

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Sam completed a B.Sc/B.BMED (hons) at The University of Melbourne with a major in Neuroscience in 2023. His current PhD studies investigate the neuroscience behind brain cancer and memory, and how this relationship influences disease progression. When he isn’t in the lab, he loves hiking, acoustic guitar, and a bit of surfing.

Weaknesses: Dad jokes that are so bad they are somehow funny
Strengths: Dad jokes that are so bad they are somehow funny

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. — Albert Einstein

Jay Kim

Masters Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2022

Jay is from Goyang, a residential city in South Korea. Jay's childhood dream was to become a novelist, but life had other plans for her. Instead of writing stories, she studied BBiomedSc/BECSE at Monash University, and later found herself writing software programs and doing translation work, which she admits has been a pretty fun ride so far. In her master’s, Jay will be exploring the enigmatic world of simultaneous activity and its relationship with learning.

Luc Marsden

PhD Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2024

Luc grew up in France where - unlike Marius who's been exiled for his treachery - Luc did indulge in the not-so-lost French art of drinking (lots of) wine and eating (lots of) cheese. Luc then moved to the UK and obtained his BSc in Neuroscience at the University of Manchester where he learnt a bit about the brain but mostly about rain. To escape the relentless Mancunian showers, Luc moved to Cambridge where he worked for two startup companies. The first (CS Genetics) developed a new instrument-free scRNA-seq method whilst the second (Cosyne Therapeutics) applied genome-wide CRISPRi KD screens and organoid models to find new druggable targets against glioblastoma. His PhD work at the Palmer focuses on investigating the electrophysiological properties of human Glioma cells using in vitro Patch clamp and on applying spatial transcriptomics to study the interaction between healthy neurons and glioma cells in the human brain. Outside of the lab, Luc is obsessed with climbing…it's safe to assume you can find him hugging rocks in the Grampians on most weekends.

Nico Glatz

Honours Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2024

"After his first love, philosophy, Nico found that most of the fascinating answers about the learning and the mind were being discovered using the biological tools developed in the 21st century. Following this, he completed a B.Sc with a major in Neuroscience at The University of Melbourne in 2023. Joining the Palmer Lab as an honours student, his project will be using two-photon imaging to study changes to thalamocortical communication from higher order thalamic nuclei after learning."

Nel

Masters Student — Joined the Palmer Laboratory in 2023

Nel grew up in sunny Perth, where she dreamed of being an actress and astronaut. Through her uni studies, she unlocked a passion for neuroscience and completed her BSc (Neuro) at The University of Western Australia in 2022. Craving a move to the big city and exciting research, she headed to Melbourne, joining the Palmer lab in 2023 to commence her Masters in Biomedical Science. Her project aims to further our understanding of the neural bases of learning, focusing on plasticity in M2, using patch-clamp electrophysiology and optogenetics.