FLAG Researcher Spotlight: Alexander Matthews

Alexander Matthews

“I wanted to understand what was actually happening in the brain during mental health struggles and more healthy states of mind … with the hope of contributing to treatments that address the underlying causes.”

Tell us a little about yourself, your research interests, and what was the focus of your honours project?
Kia ora, I’m Alexander. I went to school in Kirikiriroa Hamilton and studied Neuroscience and Data Science at the University of Otago. Aotearoa has some of the highest rates of youth depression, anxiety, and suicide in the world—and I saw that up close at school in friends who were exhausted, anxious, lying awake at night, and struggling to face the day in the morning.
For the people I knew, treatments often seemed ineffective or brought side effects that disrupted daily life. I wanted to understand what was actually happening in the brain during mental health struggles and more healthy states of mind—the biological mechanisms behind them—with the hope of contributing to treatments that address the underlying causes. An undergraduate Neuroscience degree offered a great starting point for this line of thinking.
Halfway through first year, I went to a social hosted by the Neuroscience Program and got chatting with a few researchers. Working with large, complex datasets kept coming up as increasingly important in neuroscience—and more than once, an academic said that if they were doing undergrad now, they’d be learning Data Science too. I added Data Science as a major that week.
Looking back, I’m especially grateful for that advice. It gave me the foundation for my Honours project, supervised by Dr. Bart Geurten in the Department of Zoology where I used machine learning to quantify seizure behaviour in a developmental epilepsy model. We developed (and used) a new method that enabled a scalable, more granular analysis of clinically relevant behaviours. As computational tools evolve rapidly across both industry and academia, I feel very excited to be working at the interface—where technical breakthroughs are directly shaping scientific discovery.

You have just been awarded the 2025 Woolf Fisher Scholarship to pursue your doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. Massive congratulations, you are making your fellow NZ neuroscience researchers proud! Can you please tell us about the process of applying for this? How did you find putting yourself out there? Any advice for other younger researchers thinking about applying for scholarships?

Thank you! don’t know if there’s any universal advice, but what helped me most was having already spent time thinking about the challenges people are facing in the world—and where I might be able to contribute something meaningful. I’d been thinking about that since high school, but choosing a PhD topic made it feel real. Committing years of time and focus to one direction means not putting it somewhere else, so I thought a lot about where I felt I could best spend my energy. That shaped how I approached the whole application process. In the end, it was just about putting that thinking into words. For anyone thinking about applying for something like this, you can get started now. Chatting with friends, family, potential supervisors, and giving yourself space to think—that’s the groundwork of the application done. Next, you have to write it. That takes time, so plan for that. However long you think it’ll take—triple it.
If you’re shortlisted, there’s an in-person interview. I did a few one-on-one run-throughs with people I really respect—something I’d very highly recommend. I asked them to pose the kinds of questions they’d use on a scholarship panel, and we treated each session like the real thing. You can’t prepare for every question, but practising the process helped me find more clarity under pressure, and I felt more fluent in how I expressed my ideas each time. It was fun, too.

Could you tell us about the project you will be working on in Cambridge? Who will be your supervisors? What department will you be involved with?

My primary PhD supervisor will be Professor Jeff Dalley, who leads the Brain, Behaviour and Cognition research theme based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge.
At the broadest level, the project tackles how the brain deals with environmental uncertainty. That matters because many anxiety-related conditions—not just generalised anxiety disorder, but also things like PTSD or social anxiety—involve disruptions in how uncertainty is processed. Sometimes anxiety is useful, like when we need to be more alert in a genuinely risky situation. But sometimes it’s not helpful at all—more like a persistent sense of threat without anything concrete to respond to. What causes that shift? And are there circuits in the brain that we can trace, which track uncertainty and shape whether anxiety becomes adaptive or not?

I’m really excited about this project—it brings together the kind of neuroscience I’m most interested in at the moment: systems-level, linking brain and behaviour, and using both modelling and biology to ask questions that might actually help us improve mental health treatments down the line.

What are you most looking forward to with your move overseas? What will you miss most about NZ neuroscience?

Cambridge Neuroscience is immense—over 800 researchers across departments and institutes—and I can't wait to be a part of it.
I’m looking forward to having my thinking shaped by people with completely different ways of seeing the brain (and the world)—and to the kinds of day-to-day conversations that can only happen in a place like Cambridge, where there is a critical mass of world-leading researchers across all major branches of neuroscience. What excites me most is that so many people come to Cambridge looking for exactly that. Those are the kinds of people I want to talk with, learn from, and think alongside. Being close to other top neuroscience centres in the UK and across Europe also adds to the amazing possibilities.

I haven’t worked in neuroscience outside of Aotearoa yet, so I can’t say exactly what I’ll miss. But what I’ve really appreciated here is how open people are—keen to talk through ideas, take risks, and work collaboratively. Many of the reasons I got into neuroscience came from here, and I’ve valued being able to explore those questions in the same context that sparked them.

If people want to contact you, how should they do so? Do you have any social media profiles people can follow? We would love to keep updated on your progress overseas!

I’ve moved away from social media, but I’m always keen to connect meaningfully. If you’d like to collaborate, exchange advice, or chat through some ideas, I’d love to hear from you. I still think the best conversations happen face to face—or at least 2D-face to 2D-face—so I’m always up for a Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp... or just a coffee. Best place to reach me: arhmatthews@gmail.com.

Interviewed by Lily Bentall (University of Otago)