UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences

The Queen Square Library has been awarded a grant of £82k from the Wellcome Trust to catalogue and preserve the collections of case notes and films held as part of the Queen Square Archive. The library is jointly funded by UCL Institute of Neurology and the National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery.

Listen to The Ear, the first in a new series of podcasts called Body Pods. The Ear has been made by David Rosenberg, co-founder of experimental theatre company Shunt and UCL Ear Institute's Director,  David McAlpine. Body Pods is co-produced by Fuel and Roundhouse. To find out more visit fueltheatre.com

 Vitamin D supplements may have wide-ranging anti-ageing properties including the preservation of eyesight, according to research by UCL scientists. Read: Independent, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mirror, Express More: BBSRC press release

UCL has led a successful multi-institutional bid for £5.4 million to fund new PhD studentships in a competition run by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Neuroscientists have discovered that memories migrate, but what do they actually consist of, asks Dr Hugo Spiers (UCL Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences). Read: Guardian

Congratulations to Marc Modat, the winner of UCL Centre for Neuroimaging Techniques 2011 UCL Young Investigator in Neuroimaging Techniques award. Marc recently completed his PhD in the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC) at UCL, under the supervision of Dr Sebastien Ourselin, Prof Dave Hawkes, and Prof Nick Fox (Dementia Research Centre, Institute of Neurology). Remarkably for a PhD student, Marc has already established himself as an expert in the field of medical image registration. The image registration framework that Marc developed has been downloaded over 1700 times in the last two years. Marc has been involved in 51 publications, including 16 articles in high-impact international journals, and is a reviewer for leading journals in the field. Congratulations to Marc for this prestigious achievement!

The UCL Young Investigator in Neuroimaging Techniques award is generously sponsored by Brain Products GmbH.

The EpiPGX Consortium, coordinated by UCL Institute of Neurology's Professor Sanjay Sisodiya,and involving 15 partners from 8 countries, has received almost €6 million funding from the European Union FP7 programme to investigate the genetic basis of responses to antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) in epilepsy.

Over 50,000,000 people across the world have epilepsy. For many people, AEDs are simply not available, or the choice is extremely limited. In other countries, several AEDs are available to be prescribed, but the evidence guiding choice of drug for an individual patient is very limited. The EpiPGX Consortium will explore the influence of genetic variation on responses, both desirable and undesirable, to AEDs, aiming to identify genetic variants that will guide treatment choices at the individual level.

The Consortium is coordinated by Professor Sanjay Sisodiya (Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy), with the following partners: Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Istituto Giannina Gaslini (Italy), Eberhard Karls Universitaet Tuebingen (Germany), Stichting Epilepsie Instellingen Nederland (The Netherlands), Universitaetsklinikum Bonn (Germany), Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (Ireland), Belfast Health and Social Care Trust (UK), Islensk Erfdagreining EHF (Iceland), Universite Du Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Universitair Medisch Centrum Utrecht (The Netherlands), The University of Liverpool (UK), Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (UK), University of Glasgow (UK) and GABO:mi Gesellschaft fur Ablauforganisation:milliarium mbH & Co. KG (Germany).

The Consortium welcomes collaboration. Please contact Professor Sisodiya for further information.

Congratulations to UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience’s Professor Vincent Walsh, who has been awarded the prestigious and highly competitive Royal Society Industry Fellowship. UCL Enterprise have also selected Vince as a 2012 Knowledge Transfer Champion.

Congratulations to Professor Ray Dolan who has been elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) for “sustained outstanding contributions to the science of psychology”.

Professor Michael Hanna has been appointed as the new Director of the UCL Institute of Neurology and will commence his appointment in January 2012.