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6 Headlines FromOtago to Ireland Dr Robert Munn The journey of a Phillip Wrightson Fellow Dr Robert Munn was awarded the Neurological Foundation Wrightson Fellowship to support his work at Stanford University in the Department of Neurobiology with Associate Professor Lisa Giocomo. Dr. Robert Munn's research is concerned with understanding the functions of learning and memory by investigating the hippocampal/entorhinal circuit. Originally from New Zealand, he received his BSc, MSc and PhD from the University of Otago working with Professor Neil McNaughton in the area of anxiety, and Professor David Bilkey in the area of circadian coding of memory. After his PhD, Dr Munn received a Wrightson Fellowship in 2014 from the Neurological Foundation to work in the laboratory of Associate Professor Lisa Giocomo in the department of Neurobiology at Stanford University in California. Here he worked on projects probing the function of Grid Cells in the entorhinal cortex, publishing the results of his work in Nature Neuroscience. In 2020 he took up the position of Lecturer in the department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at National University of Ireland Galway. How is it that we can remember how to navigate to a house we lived in twenty years ago? Why is it that one of the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease is spatial disorientation? The answer lies in brain structures called the hippocampus and entorhinal cortices, structures key to the linked functions of spatial navigation and memory. We know from decades of research that damage to these structures produces a profound inability to learn new information, and a profound inability to orient and navigate in space. Perhaps the most famous case that demonstrates these phenomena is that of patient H.M. H.M. had surgery for intractable epilepsy that bilaterally removed his hippocampus and much of the surrounding rhinal cortices. Although the surgery successfully resolved H.M’s epilepsy, it left him with a profound inability to form new memories, or anterograde amnesia. Subsequent animal research produced the striking findings that hippocampal/ entorhinal damage produces a profound inability of animals to learn to navigate in space.