Dr Alberto Capurro, PhD, MSc, MD

Profile

Capurro’s first degree was an MD obtained at the Faculty of Medicine of UdelaR (Uruguay) in 1992. He later obtained an MSc (1994) and a PhD (1999) in Biology/Neuroscience at the Faculty of Science of UdelaR, within the UN sponsored plan for development of basic science (PEDECIBA). During the PhD years, Capurro had a JSPS fellowship to study stochastic process in neuron models at the Department of Bioengineering of Osaka University (Japan). After the PhD, he obtained a permanent position as Research Assistant at the Institute of Biology “Clemente Estable” of Uruguay (1996-2004). From 2002 to 2005 he was post doc at Sao Paulo University (Brazil) and later post doc at the Epileptology Section of the Freiburg University Hospital and the BCCN Freiburg (Germany) working in kindling model of temporal lobe epilepsy.

From 2008 Capurro settled in the UK, working at the University of Leicester (2008-2017) as Research Associate in a project about microelectrode arrays and Huntington’s disease. In this position, he was seconded for two years at an industry of microelectrode arrays at EPFL Lausanne with a Marie Curie fellowship. After that, he worked as Research Associate doing Matlab programming at the Department of Neuroscience of King’s College London (2017-2018) before joining the Department of Bioscience of the University of Newcastle, working as Research Associate (2018-2021) in a project about chronic pain using microelectrode arrays. Capurro joined QMUL on March 2022 as Lecturer in Neuroscience where he conducts teaching led research in EEG analysis, temporal lobe epilepsy, tinnitus, and chronic pain.

Teaching

Capurro recently supervised two MSc thesis in tinnitus (Purvi Patel) and temporal lobe epilepsy (Anna Hutber) and is preparing scientific articles with the content of this teaching led research. He is also supervising a BSc thesis on EEG correlates of mental arithmetic (Suraiya Husain). He provides lectures and practical classes for several teaching modules related to Neuroscience, Neuroanatomy and Medicine, as well as tutorials of “Problem Based Learning”. In 2023 he started the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice at QMUL. 

Research

Research Interests:

Capurro conducts teaching led research projects related to Translational Medicine in topics as tinnitus (in collaboration with Dr Daniel Drexler from the “Montevideo Tinnitus Centre”), temporal lobe epilepsy (in collaboration with Dr Vasiliki Tsirka from the London Royal Hospital) and EEG as a prognosis tool in post cardiac arrest patients (in collaboration with Dr Nikos Gorgoraptis). He is also starting a research line on diabetic neuropathy using microelectrode arrays, having obtained a Barts Charity grant to purchase a microelectrode array setup with Dr Alex Clark (Blizard Institute) for student projects and pain research with iPSC derived sensory neurons.

Publications

• Olsen T, Capurro A, Svent M, Pilati N, Large, CH, Hartell N and Hamann M (2021) Sparsely distribut-ed, presynaptic Kv3 K+ channels control spontaneous firing and cross-unit synchrony via the regulation of synaptic noise in an auditory brainstem circuit. Front. Cell. Neurosci. 15:721371. doi: 10.3389/fncel.2021.721371.

• Capurro A, Thornton J, Cessac B, Armstrong L, Sernagor E (2020) Nav1.7 gating in human iPSC de-rived sensory neurons: an experimental and computational study. BioRxiv (doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.04.235861.

• Olsen T, Capurro A, Pilati N, Large, CH and Hamann M (2018) Kv3 K+ currents contribute to spike-timing in dorsal cochlear nucleus principal cells. Neuropharmacology 133: 319-333.

• Capurro A, Bodea L, Schaefer P, Luthi-Carter R and Perreau VM (2015) Computational deconvolution of genome wide expression data from Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease brain tissues using Popula-tion-Specific Expression Analysis. Frontiers in Neuroscience 8: 441. doi:10.3389/fnins.2014.00441

• Capurro A, Diambra L, Lorenzo D, Macadar O, Martin M, Mostaccio C, Plastino A, Perez J, Rozman E, Torres M, and Velluti J (1999) Human brain dynamics: the analysis of EEG signals with Tsallis infor-mation measure. Physica A 265: 235-254.