69 students showcased their exciting research projects in the fields of clinical neuroscience, motor neuroscience, imaging, cognitive and behavioural neuroscience, electrophysiology as well as molecular neuroscience.
- Samuel Hewitt won the MSc prize for his poster “Inner retinal layer thinning as a biomarker for dementia risk in Parkinson’s Disease”. He is an MSc Brain and Mind Sciences student, currently completing his project at the Dementia Research Centre.
- Roisin Sullivan won the pre-upgrade PhD prize for her project on “Novel loss-of- function mutation in ACBD5 found in family with ataxia”. She is a student at the Department of Molecular Neuroscience.
- Dr Harith Akram, won the post-upgrade PhD prize, which was sponsored by Addgene, for his poster “Towards Connectomic Functional Neurosurgery”. He is based at the Unit of Functional Neurosurgery, Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders.
- Dr Mikail Weston, from the Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy, was awarded the 3Rs prize for his project “Chemogenetic dissection of the mechanisms of secondary epileptogenesis”. The principles of the 3Rs are: replacing animal research with alternatives, reducing the number of animals used and refining experiments to minimalise harm and discomfort to the animals
Dr Selina Wray, who was recently named the 2018 David Hague Early Career Investigator of the Year, kicked off the afternoon session with her keynote address on “Human stem cell models of Frontotemporal Dementia and Alzheimers disease”.
This was followed by talks by four PhD students; Eleanora Lugara, Caroline Casey, Sean Cavanagh and Lauren Byrne.
Professor Karl Friston delivered the closing keynote speech on “Active interference and artificial curiosity”. Professor Friston received the Golden Brain Award in 2003 and was ranked the number 1 most influential neuroscientist by Semantic Scholar in 2016. The symposium closed with a drinks reception.
The Symposium was a great success and provided a fantastic opportunity for Queen Square students to showcase their research. We would like to extend our gratitude to Abcam, Thorlabs, Invicro, Proteintech, Addgene, Stratech and Promega for their sponsorship.