Brian Christie

Brian R. Christie (born 1964) is a Professor of Medicine and Neuroscience at The University of Victoria. He helped found the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Victoria and served as its director from 2010–2017. He is a Michael Smith Senior Scholar Award winner. Christie received his PhD in 1992 from the University of Otago before doing postdoctoral work with Daniel Johnston at Baylor College of Medicine and Terrence Sejnowski at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and then became Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. Promoted to Associate Professor in 2007. Full Professor in 2013.

Research Christie's early research focused on heterosynaptic plasticity in the hippocampal formation. During the course of this work, he discovered that prior synaptic activity could impact the capacity for synapses to subsequently show activity-dependent forms of plasticity, a phenomenon that he originally called "priming" but that has since been termed "metaplasticity". He completed a PhD at the University of Otago in 1993. His Ph.D. work generated 9 publications on synaptic plasticity with Abraham. Following the completion of his Ph.D., he became interested in how calcium entered neurons, and began a post-doctoral fellowship with Dan Johnston. In this period he showed for the first time, using calcium imaging, that different types of voltage-gated calcium channels were not distributed homogeneously throughout neuron dendrites and somata. Moreover, he was able to show that certain types of voltage-gated channels played a preferential role in long-term forms of synaptic depression, or LTD. Despite lasting only 2.5 years, this post-doctoral fellowship generated 8 publications. In 1996, Christie turned down several job offers at Canadian institutions and moved to the Salk Institute to work with T. Sejnowski. While his aspirations for becoming more involved in the computational modeling the Sejnowski lab was known for were not realized, it was during this period that met Dr.'s Henriette van Praag and Fred "Rusty"Gage and became interested in neurogenesis. Together these individuals published four influential publications on adult hippocampal neurogenesis, with Christie performing the majority of the electrophysiological recordings.

Christie's research has shown that exercise promotes adult neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus.

This work has since progressed to show that exercise can have beneficial effects for the brains of animals that have been exposed to ethanol while in the womb, an animal model of fetal alcohol syndrome effects. His current work continues to examine how exercise can benefit the brain. He is part of the Island Medical Program and the Division of Medical Sciences, a joint venture of the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria to increase the number of medical doctors being trained in Canada, and teaches neuroanatomy and problem-based learning (PBL) in this program .