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Hugo Layard Horsfall is part of the 2024 Crick doctoral clinical fellow intake in Andreas Schaefer’s lab.
Background and career journey
I studied medicine at St George’s and intercalated in Neuroscience at Kings College London, where I worked on gene therapy for spinal cord injury. I then went to Cambridge for the Academic Foundation Program and researched the role of surgical management in traumatic brain injury.
Following the Academic Foundation Program, I returned to London, secured a neurosurgery training number and became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons. I completed 3 years of neurosurgery residency at Queen Square and Imperial, and then started my PhD.
At medical school, I sought exposure to research as it felt meaningful to drive improvements in patient care. I had broad research experiences, but as my interest in neurosurgery developed, my research became increasingly neuroscience focused, and I am currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Surgical Technology Group at Queen Square where our focus is technology, innovation, robotics, and artificial intelligence in neurosurgery.
Through this work, I became progressively interested in novel ways to interface the central nervous system, and co-created a pan-London group (Impact Network) to bring like-minded researchers together. Through this collaboration, it allowed me to meet scientists at the Crick with common research goals and expertise, which provided the opportunity to start my PhD here.
I was always motivated to do a PhD. The protected research time to develop my academic writing, critical thinking, and identify research gaps within the neurosurgical patient pathway is essential for career development, skill acquisition and to deliver impactful research. Further, the unique environment of the Crick complemented my clinical research experience, and I wanted to learn to “think like a scientist”.
Research area
My PhD uses a novel electrode (Neuropixels) to record from hundreds or thousands of individual neurons simultaneously, in real time from the brain. The lab I joined (Schaefer) had experience of using Neuropixels in animal models, and very recently two groups in America translated this to humans. My work focuses on obtaining single neuron recordings from the human brain during neurosurgery using Neuropixels. We hope that better understanding how single neurons behave within microcircuits, and their impact on neuronal populations, will help us better understand how the brain functions in health and disease. We have developed the entire pipeline from patient recruitment, intraoperative recording, and data analysis whilst managing the ethical and regulatory hurdles. We recently completed our first in human Neuropixels case. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first human recording using Neuropixels outside of the US.
Fellowship experience
I am inspired by the Crick on a daily basis. A huge draw to the Crick is the phenomenal science that happens, and the exposure to world-leading visiting scientists through talks, collaborations, and symposia. There is a rich tapestry of academic opportunities, fuelled by incredible staff that feels like a family. It is incredible to join an academic environment such as the Crick, and the “can do” attitude that facilitates researchers to thrive.
It has also been amazing to meet people from across the world, at different career stages and with different academic backgrounds. Impactful research requires collaboration and vast expertise, which is a central ethos of the Crick. Starting at the Crick was a challenge. Coming from a full-time clinical role as a neurosurgery registrar meant that I was used to long, hard days operating and being on call. To suddenly have complete autonomy of my time, and essentially an entire project pipeline to develop felt overwhelming at times.
A PhD is as much as about academic output as it is about personal development, time management, discipline and problem solving. Once I realised this, I was able to enjoy the steep learning curve of doing a PhD, and attack the skill development required head on.
