Rate My Professor Clea Warburton

Professor Clea Warburton holds the position of Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and serves as Head of School in the School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience at the University of Bristol. She earned her B.Sc. from the University of Reading and her Ph.D. from the University of London. Her research centers on the neural and cellular substrates of learning and memory processes in rodents, with a particular emphasis on the distinct roles of the perirhinal cortex, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampal formation in recognition memory components such as familiarity discrimination, object-in-place associative recognition memory, and recency recognition memory. Utilizing complementary behavioral, pharmacological, molecular, pharmacogenetic, and optogenetic techniques, her work dissects the neural basis of recognition memory and explores information processing across brain-wide memory circuits during encoding, consolidation, and retrieval phases.

Warburton has produced 53 research outputs, including 47 peer-reviewed journal articles, and leads multiple funded projects as Principal Investigator, such as 'Rapid silencing of specific populations of genes for neuronal plasticity and memory' (2025-2028) and 'LEC and associative memory' (2024-2027). Her highly influential publications include 'When is the hippocampus involved in recognition memory?' with G.R.I. Barker (Journal of Neuroscience, 2011), cited over 1,000 times; 'Recognition memory for objects, place, and temporal order: a disconnection analysis of the role of the medial prefrontal cortex and perirhinal cortex' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2007), cited over 850 times; 'Neural circuitry for rat recognition memory' with M.W. Brown (Behavioural Brain Research, 2015); and recent works like 'Functional and Regional Specificity of Noradrenergic Signaling for Encoding and Retrieval of Associative Recognition Memory in the Rat' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2025). Affiliated with Bristol Neuroscience, she contributes to academic leadership in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences through her role as Head of School.