About Dr Thomas Butts
I am a developmental neurobiologist interested in how the brain develops and how this development has evolved over the last 500 or so million years. I teach developmental biology, neuroanatomy, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology across the medical curriculum.
After reading Cell Biology at Durham, my doctorate explored the evolution of the animal homeobox gene superfamily at Oxford, where I was also a college lecturer at St Catherine's College. From there, I moved to work as a postdoctoral researcher at King's College, London on the development and evolution of the hindbrain.
My first teaching post was as a lecturer in neurobiology on the Nanchang Joint Programme at Queen Mary, University of London, and before moving to Sunderland I was the programme director for the Anatomy degree at the University of Liverpool.
Teaching and supervision
I am an interim Principal Lecturer in Neuroscience in the School of Medicine, and the theme lead for Neuroscience. I teach molecular biology, genetics, genomics, developmental biology, neuroanatomy, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology across the medical curriculum.
Research
I am interested in the molecular control of neurogenesis and its evolution across the vertebrate phylogeny. In particular, I work on the cerebellum, which contains ~80% of the neurons in the brain, and exhibits a huge variety of morphological forms across vertebrates. As such, it's a great model system for asking how complex, foliated brains evolved. Unsurprisingly given the huge numbers of neurons produced during development, cerebellar progenitors also give rise to the most common paediatric brain tumour, medulloblastoma.
I am also interested in human brain development and maturation across the life span, and collaborate with the School of Law to explore the implications of human critical periods and myelinations patterns during development for the legal system in relation to juvenile sentencing.