Javier de Lucas Romero

I obtained my Bachelor’s Degree in Health Biology from the University of Alcalá in 2016. After that, I pursued a Master’s Degree in Neuroscience at Autonomous University in Madrid, which granted me access to doctoral studies at the Neurobiology of Pain group based in the University of Alcalá. There, I successfully completed my PhD in Cellular Signalling under the supervision of Dr. José Antonio López García. Following that, I relocated to Washington University in St. Louis to work as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Jacob McPherson.

During my tenure at the University of Alcalá, I acquired proficiency in a variety of electrophysiological techniques and different in vitro preparations of mice spinal cord. My primary focus was on the study of spontaneous activity in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord, as well as investigating the various mechanisms that sustain this activity. I played a key role in setting up the 64-electrode MEAs recording technique in the lab, enabling simultaneous detection of spontaneous activity in large groups of neurons. Additionally, I developed a technique to record antidromic activity from individual primary afferents to study the relationship between primary afferent depolarization and spontaneous activity in the dorsal horn. Furthermore, I am proficient in MATLAB programming and have developed several analysis algorithms for studying MEAs recordings. Moreover, I contributed to the design of a machine learning-based tool used for predicting functional connectivity between neurons based on their correlation patterns.

During my PhD, I had the opportunity to visit Dr. Steven Prescott's lab in Toronto, where I learned the fundamentals of cultured cell patch clamp recording and optogenetics techniques. I also had the privilege of visiting Dr. David Hughes' lab in Glasgow, where I gained hands-on experience in in vitro patch clamp procedures performed on mice spinal cord slices, and I was exposed to various other techniques employed by Dr. Andrew Todd’s group