Dr. Courtney's Bio

Dr. Courtney leads the neuronal signaling laboratory at the Turku Bioscience Centre in Finland.  He also established and is head of the Turku Screening Unit, a facility affiliated with Finnish and European infrastructures for chemical biology and early stage drug discovery. The unit offers access to lab automation instrumentation and provides services, in particular for use of live-cell high-throughput microscopy, as well as computational screening approaches from partners in structural biology teams.  

Dr. Courtney completed his PhD at the University of Dundee in 1992 and moved to Finland to develop optical methods to study neuronal cell signaling.  Such methods continue to develop rapidly and are becoming increasingly important to identify disease mechanisms.  They can also be used in phenotypic screens to help identify drugs and other compounds that may have the capacity to  restore specific cellular functions.  This talk will describe recent work to develop miniaturized live-cell optical methods to help streamline the phenotypic identification of functional defect in variants o SynGAP1 and their application to variants known or suspected to cause disease.  This work is funded by a joint grant from SRF-US, SRF-Europe and Leon and Friends e.v.