The moving brain: On stress, prediction, consciousness, and alpha7 nicotinic receptors

Albert Gjedde is a Danish-Canadian neuroscientist who currently serves as Professor of Translational Neurobiology at the University of Southern Denmark. He is Emeritus Professor of Neurobiology and Pharmacology at the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Copenhagen, and currently also Adjunct Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University, and Adjunct Professor of Radiology and Radiological Science at Johns Hopkins University.

As a junior investigator, Albert Gjedde worked as a visiting scientist at universities and research institutions in Lund, Cologne, Leipzig and Dresden, Paris, Szeged, and Baltimore. In 1986, he joined the McConnell Brain Imaging Center at McGill University, first as Associate and then as Full Professor from 1986 to 1994 and Director of the McConnell Brain Imaging Center. In Denmark, Albert Gjedde founded and headed the PET Center at Aarhus University Hospitals from 1994 to 2008, and in Aarhus he also founded the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN) in 2001 and the Danish Neuroscience Center in 2008.

Albert Gjedde’s research focuses on the relations between neuroplasticity and neurotransmission that can be revealed by mapping radio ligand binding and metabolism of the living brain. The investigations explore the relations among energy metabolism and neurotransmission, by recording changes under pharmacological and cognitive manipulations. He uses PET to understand the synthesis and release of neurotransmitter molecules and the behavior of these transmitters under different functional conditions of the brain, normal as well as pathological, and the spatial and temporal relations among changes of cerebral blood flow, which is a common measure of brain work, and the cerebral oxygen consumption rate, which is the more precise measure of this work. Albert Gjedde collaborates on studies that explore the lesions and degeneration of brain tissue in disorders such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's diseases, stroke, depression, and somatizing disorders, as well as disorders of addiction, testing hypotheses that seek to explain the restructuring of neuronal networks after processing of sensory activity by healthy subjects and by volunteers suffering from inborn or acquired lesions.

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