BNA 2025 Symposium - From Postdoc to PI: Making Your Lab Vision a Reality with Dr Sam Booker
As part of the BNA2025 Silent Symposium series, Dr Sam Booker from the University of Edinburgh and Scientifica's Adam Jackson presented the session - From Postdoc to PI: Making Your Lab Vision a Reality.
The audio recording with slides of this session has been made available courtesy of the British Neuroscience Association, so if you missed it it is well worth a listen, full of useful tips and shared experience that will help you plan your journey to setting up your own lab in the future.
Dr Sam Booker presents the symposium 'From Postdoc to PI: Making Your Lab Vision a Reality' at BNA2025
About Sam Booker
Sam completed an undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh with an Honours Degree in Pharmacology in 2008. From there, he moved to Glasgow University to perform a PhD in the lab of Imre Vida, performing a variety of whole-cell patch clamp recording techniques from hippocampal interneurons. He moved with the lab to Berlin in 2011 to take up a 3 year post-doctoral position at the Charite Universitaetmedizin – still in the lab of Imre Vida. They further studied the role of hippocampal and cortical interneurons in local microcircuit formation, using a combination of whole-cell, calcium imaging, and GABA uncaging.
From 2014 – 2021 Sam was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh in the labs of Peter Kind and David Wyllie, with a primary focus on understanding synaptic mechanisms in the early brain that contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders. For this, we established multi-photon imaging and uncaging combined with whole-cell and field recording. In 2021 Sam was awarded a SIDB ESAT Fellowship to form his own research group. Their new(ish) lab studies the fundamental mechanisms leading to plasticity of neurons in the developing brain, and how these are influenced by inhibitory signalling. For this they employ a combination of electrophysiology and neuroanatomy in cell and slice cultures, and acute brain slices from rodents and humans.
