Tara Keck facts for kids

Tara Keck is a scientist who studies the brain. She was born on November 26, 1978, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA. She is a professor of Neuroscience at University College London in the United Kingdom.

Professor Keck researches how our brains change and learn. She looks at how brain connections, called synapses, adapt as we experience new things. She also studies how these changes affect our behavior. Her work helps us understand how the brain changes as people get older. She also explores how brain health changes with age-related diseases.

Professor Keck has worked with the United Nations Population Fund. This work focuses on how to help older people live healthy lives. She has recently studied loneliness in older people, especially looking at how it affects men and women differently.

Tara Keck's Education Journey

Professor Keck went to Harvard University from 1997 to 2001. There, she studied bioengineering, which combines biology and engineering. After Harvard, she earned her PhD degree in biomedical engineering in 2005. She completed her PhD at Boston University. She grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and went to Fairview High School.

Professor Keck's Career and Research

After her PhD, Professor Keck did more research at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany. She worked with famous scientists there. In 2010, she received a special fellowship from the Medical Research Council (United Kingdom). This allowed her to start her own research lab at King's College London.

In 2014, she moved her lab to University College London. She received another important fellowship in 2018 from the Wellcome Trust. This award helps her continue her important brain research.

What Does Professor Keck Study?

Professor Keck's research focuses on how brain connections change. This is called synaptic plasticity. She studies how these changes happen in a living brain. She is very interested in something called homeostatic plasticity. This is how the brain keeps its activity balanced.

Her work has shown that the brain balances its activity across a whole network of cells. It's not just one cell doing it alone. Her research also looks at how brain plasticity changes as people age. She studies how it changes in diseases that affect older people.

Awards and Recognition

Professor Keck has received several awards for her work. She was given the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. She also received the Wekerle Foundation Award. She was even a finalist for the Max Planck Society Neuroscience Research Award.