QUBIC Seminar

Speaker: Charlie Gray
Date: Thursday 5 November 1pm – 2pm AEDT
Zoom: Click here to join the seminar

Abstract:
Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease recently became Australia’s leading cause of death where the number of Australians living with dementia is projected to exceed 1 million by 2065. Our understanding of these neurodegenerative diseases is limited in fundamental ways – what triggers neuroinflammation; what is the combined effect of various brain cells (glial, astrocytes, neurons) on symptom development and the build-up of synaptic dysfunction and interneuron communication failures. Current methods to understand these neurological processes are limited. Multielectrode arrays don’t have single cell resolution; patch clamps are difficult to use; fluorescence imaging is affected by phototoxicity. We are developing NEUROscope to target these limitations. Designed to resolve intracellular dynamics at up to 10kHz and image small networks of neurons and surrounding glial cells, all label and probe free. The NEUROscope aims to capture cytoskeletal structural dynamics involved in neuron spike signal propagation. Capturing this fundamental behaviour with subcellular precision is key to developing our understanding of disease risk factor development and aggregation in neural networks.

Bio:
Charlie Gray is a PhD candidate in the Quantum Optics Lab at the University of Queensland, supervised by Professor Warwick Bowen and studying with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Quantum Biotechnology (QUBIC). His project develops an optical microscope for imaging cell rheology at high speed and subcellular resolution.

He completed a Bachelor of Advanced Science (Honours) in Bioinformatics at UQ in 2024, graduating with First Class Honours. During his degree he worked on ancestral protein sequence reconstruction with Professor Mikael Boden and sequencing methods simulations with Associate Professor Cheong Xin Chan at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics. A semester exchange at Keio University in Tokyo took him into quantum computing and quantum networking, after which he was invited to join a quantum internet switch project at the Kawasaki business incubation centre with Professor Rodney Van Meter.

His work sits at the intersection of quantum optics and cell biology, applying precision optical approaches to questions in cellular mechanics and neurodegeneration.