Tim Murphy

Tim Murphy is a foundational scientist who contributes to understanding of how mouse cortex adapts after stroke, resulting in remapping of brain function from damaged to surviving areas using mouse models. The lab develops new imaging and optogenetic methods that have parallels to human brain imaging and stimulation tools. In developing these tools that laboratory participates in the Canadian Neurophotonics Platform and leads UBC’s Dynamic Brain Circuits in Health and Disease Cluster which actively seeks to articulate new optical methods that are applied to questions related to diseases of the nervous system. Murphy has been a past instructor in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Imaging Neurons and Neural Activity course and UBC’s 3D-microscopy courses. By understanding the stroke recovery process on a circuit level, the lab hopes to advance patient translatable brain stimulation or other plasticity-inducing treatments. More recently the laboratory has extended these approaches to mouse models of psychiatric disorders such as depression and autism. To facilitate circuit interrogation in vivo the lab develops high-throughput models which automate animal imaging.