Ole Sudland
Visiting PhD student
Ole.Sudland@ukmuenster.de
I graduated with an MSc in Neuroscience from UCL in 2021, where I studied circadian modulation of the antennal ear in Drosophila. Since 2022, I have been a PhD student in the Chemical Biology of Ion Channels (Chembion) programme at the University of Münster, Germany, focusing on the role of hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels in absence epilepsy. HCN channels function as neuronal pacemakers, regulating rhythmic brain activity, yet remain untargeted in epilepsy treatments. My research explores their role in the cortico-thalamic loop through in vivo local field potential recordings.During my six-month visit to the Genzel lab, I am applying machine learning to classify sleep stages in HexMaze electrophysiology datasets. By employing a Boltzmann Machine—an unsupervised generative deep learning model—the goal is to classify sleep substages in rodents. This method can then be extended to assess how HCN-modulating drugs influence neural activity and sleep architecture in animal models of absence epilepsy.