Bio
Professor Bryce Vissel is the Head of the Neurodegenerative Diseases Program at St Vincent’s Centre for Applied Medical Research. His work spans neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal disorders, as well as research involving the neural basis of learning and memory, and movement mechanisms. His team’s work has, among other things, provided new insights into synapse function and shown that the brain has far greater potential for regeneration and repair than previously thought.
After being conferred his PhD in medical genetics from the University of Melbourne in 1991, Prof. Vissel joined Garvan’s Neuroscience Division, where he was subsequently awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council CJ Martin Fellowship to pursue neuroscience research with Prof. Stephen Heinemann at the world-leading Salk Institute in San Diego, USA. He spent 10 years at Salk, where he authored a number of seminal studies describing molecular mechanisms that regulate synaptic function and their role in behaviour and neurological diseases. He also received several prestigious awards: a Human Frontiers Award, a Fulbright Award and a Lieberman Award.
