Dr Gerrit Hilgen started as a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University in May 2020. He gained his PhD in 2012 at the University of Oldenburg (Germany) and has been employed since as a Research Fellow in Computational Neuroscience (Prof. Jutta Kretzberg, University of Oldenburg) and as a Research Associate in Retinal Neuroscience (Prof. Evelyne Sernagor, Newcastle University). He is interested in sensory signal processing and neuroanatomy with a focus on the mature and neonatal retina in health and disease and human pluripotent stem cell derived retinal organoids. Dr Hilgen helped to develop UK’s first experimental and analytical framework for light stimulation and simultaneous recording from hundreds to thousands of retinal ganglion cells, investigating various aspects of global retinal network function across the lifespan in mice and retinal organoids in health and disease. All his peer-reviewed publications span several disciplines such as neuroscience, stem cell sciences and neuroinformatics. He has become an expert in a wide range of scientific skills including retinal neuroscience, MEA recordings, scientific computing, retinal anatomy and functional imaging.
At this point of his career, he would like to come full circle, going back to his initial interest in single cells, while harnessing his knowledge about global retinal networks that he has built up over the last years. His long-term ambition is to build up a well-established physiology laboratory that bridges neuroscience, molecular biology and neuroinformatics to investigate developing and mature global networks in retinas and retinal organoids, as well as in health and disease.
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