Dr Carlie Cullen
Group Leader
Dr Carlie Cullen leads the Glial Neurobiology, Cognition and Behaviour Research Group at Mater Research and is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania.
Dr Cullen’s research vision is to understand the neurobiological mechanisms that drive healthy brain function, and what happens when the system goes awry, to inform the development of sustained and effective treatments for neurodevelopmental, neurological, and neuropsychiatric disorders.
Dr Cullen and her team are currently seeking to determine the importance of myelin formation during brain development and ongoing adaptability of myelin content in shaping the way information is processed in the brain, and subsequently how this impacts behavioural actions throughout life. By uncovering how myelination and myelin plasticity influences brain function and behaviour, Dr Cullen hopes to determine whether these processes could be targeted to treat the pathological symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders, neuropsychiatric disease, and other neurological conditions.
This will build on Dr Cullen’s recent research that demonstrated that oligodendrocyte generation increases coincident with symptom onset, in two animal models of dementia, to compensate for the loss of existing cells that die due to excessive protein deposition. She has also recently discovered a new form of neural plasticity, demonstrating that the shape of existing myelin is actively modified to speed up action potential conduction during learning.
Dr Cullen attained her PhD from The University of Queensland in 2014, under the supervision of Professor Karen Moritz, Associate Professor Nickolas Lavidis and Associate Professor Thomas Burne, where she used rodent models to demonstrate that chronic exposure to even a small amount of alcohol during gestation was associated with long-lasting anxiety-like behaviour in adult offspring. Upon completion of her doctorate, Dr Cullen joined the laboratory of Professor Kaylene Young at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania. During her time in Tasmania, Dr Cullen developed a passion for understanding how glial cells influence healthy brain function, cognition and behaviour. In particular, her research focussed on understanding how cells of the oligodendrocyte lineage communicate with neurons; how this communication influences learning, memory and motor behaviour and whether this interaction could be targeted to promote brain repair in diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS).
To date, Dr Cullen has published 20 research papers and secured >$2.6M in research funding ($1.1M as lead investigator) from the NHMRC, ARC, Brain Foundation and MS Australia. She has shown that the administration of low-intensity repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can promote new myelinating oligodendrocyte addition in the brain and helped drive the translation of this basic neuroscience discovery into a phase I clinical trial. This has now progressed to a national multi-site phase II trial examining the safety and preliminary efficacy of rTMS as a brain repair therapy for people living with MS (TAURUS.2 trial).
