Rate My Professor Rob Μunn

Dr Rob Munn is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Otago and Director of the Neuroscience Teaching Programme in the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences. He earned his BSc, MSc and PhD at the University of Otago, where his doctoral research examined anxiety, feeding and circadian rhythms in the hippocampus under the supervision of Professors Neil McNaughton and David Bilkey. After completing his doctorate, Munn undertook postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Associate Professor Lisa Giocomo at Stanford University, focusing on the mechanisms underlying grid cell formation in the entorhinal cortex. He subsequently held an academic appointment in Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Galway before returning to the University of Otago in 2022.

Munn’s research centres on the neurobiology of memory, with particular emphasis on the hippocampal formation and associated regions. Using single-neuron electrophysiology, imaging and computational approaches in behaving rodents, he investigates place cells, grid cells, head direction cells and the coordination of hippocampal-prefrontal activity during behavioural strategy transitions. His work has explored circadian modulation of hippocampal theta rhythms, the effects of maternal immune activation on neural synchrony, and alterations in hippocampal activity in models of schizophrenia and Down syndrome. In addition to his laboratory research, Munn contributes to teaching in neuroscience and has received recognition including a 2014 Neurological Foundation of New Zealand Postdoctoral Fellowship and a 2024 School of Biomedical Sciences Research and Teaching Award. Key publications include studies on entorhinal velocity signals, circadian modulation of hippocampal place-cell firing rates and disrupted hippocampal synchrony following maternal immune activation.