Rate My Professor David Bilkey

Professor David Bilkey is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago. He obtained his BA (Hons) and PhD from the University of Otago in 1987. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington in 1988, he returned to Otago as a lecturer, advancing through the ranks to full professor. From 2009 to 2013, he served as Head of the Department of Psychology. Currently, he chairs the Marsden Fund Council, New Zealand's premier contestable research fund. Bilkey is a past recipient of the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and has served on several major international and national funding panels. His research has been supported by grants from the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the Marsden Fund.

Bilkey's general research area is systems neuroscience, with a particular focus on the role of the temporal cortex regions of the brain in memory and learning processes. He employs a combination of electrophysiological and behavioral procedures to study how these temporal areas function and interact with regions such as the prefrontal cortex. A key focus of his laboratory is investigating how the function of the hippocampus and related regions is altered in schizophrenia using an animal model of the disorder. Specific interests include the biological basis of episodic memory—what, where, and when—spatial memory and navigation, hippocampal place cells, and neural coordination during memory retrieval. His research group explores how the hippocampal region processes spatial (“where”) information, the perirhinal cortex encodes object (“what”) information, and the prefrontal cortex integrates this with prior experience and motivation to form coherent episodic memories. Bilkey has authored over 120 articles in high-impact international journals. Key publications include “Neural encoding of competitive effort in the anterior cingulate cortex” with K.H. Hillman (Nature Neuroscience, 2012), “Disorganised phase coding as a mechanism underlying sequential processing deficits in schizophrenia” (AWCBR Proceedings, 2025), “Inflammation in schizophrenia: The role of disordered oscillatory mechanisms” with L.J. Speers (Cells, 2025), and “Maternal immune activation alters bout structure of rat 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations” with K.J. Scott and L.J. Speers (Behavioural Brain Research, 2025).