Annual Early Career Prize winners
The Early Career UCL Investigator Award in Neuroimaging Techniques was established in 2007.
Award winner 2020
The Early Career UCL Investigator Award in Neuroimaging Techniques was established in 2007. It is designed to reward an outstanding contribution to the field of neuroimaging techniques, in the form of a single or multiple achievements, by an investigator at UCL at an early stage of his or her career. The contribution can be a significant innovation in neuroimaging techniques or a particularly innovative application of neuroimaging. The Award is sponsored by Brain Products GmBH and Brain Products UK.
In 2020 the CNT executive committee selected Yunzhe Liu from a competitive field of candidates for his work on neural replay.
From the nomination statement by Prof. Ray Dolan:
[...] A seminal paper published last year in Cell in 2019 is worth specific mention. In this paper, Yunzhe showed, for the first time, that fast replay of prior experience could be measured in the human brain. More importantly, he went beyond what is known from animal research to show that replay is not simply a recapitulation of prior experience but represents an inference as to the underlying structure of this experience. This paper has opened many rich avenues for future studies.
Yunzhe’s major methodological contributions include developing a sophisticated method not only to index neural reactivation, but to also to determine its sequentially. This tool that equally applicable to human neurophysiological or animal neurophysiological data. [...]
The award ceremony was held virtually this year, prior to the annual EEG lecture given by Prof. Marcello Massimini.
Award winner 2019
The 2019 the prize was awarded to Dr. Tim Tierney for his groundbreaking work on wearable Optically Pumped Magnetoencephalography (OPM) for basic and clinical neuroscience at UCL.
Statement by Louis Lemieux, CNT chair, on the occasion of Tim Tierney winning the 2019 UCL Centre for Neuroimaging Techniques Early Career Award:
"This award rewards an outstanding contribution to the field of neuroimaging techniques by an investigator at UCL at an early stage of his or her career. Thanks to the support of Brain Products GmbH and Brain Products UK, the award consists of a trophy, a personalised certificate and £1000. The winner is determined by preferential voting by senior academics based on short nomination portfolios; This year, we received five excellent nominations. In the name of the Centre’s executive committee, I am very glad that we are able to underline Tim’s excellent work on a new type of magneto-encephalography in this manner."
Alongside his supervisor Prof Gareth Barnes, CNT Chair Prof Louis Lemieux, Annual EEG lecture speaker Prof Nikos Logothetis and Màrio Bàrtolo from Brain Products UK (from left to right). Tim is holding the award certificate.