About us

Find out more about the history of the Neuroscience Careers Network, its aims, and committee members.

The Early Career Neuroscience Forum was established in late 2010, changing its name in 2014 to the Neuroscience Careers Network (NCN) to encompass the work it does to support group leaders as well as PhD/post-docs. The aim of the Neuroscience Careers Network is to identify and engage with neuroscientists across the UCL Neuroscience Domain

The Neuroscience Careers Network is supported, administratively and financially, by the UCL Neuroscience Domain Steering Group. Their work is specifically aligned to the Neuroscience Domain's key strategic goal to educate, develop, recruit and retain outstanding neuroscientists trained in multiple disciplines.

The Network encourages interaction and mentoring by organising career-advice seminars and grant writing workshops and is very open to talk suggestions from the neuroscience community. Typical seminars/workshops include:

Grant writing workshops
Presentation skills workshops
Interview skills workshops
Supervision skills workshops
Alternative Careers for Scientists
Resilience and overcoming adversity
What does an academic career look like?

Committee members

Chair of the Network

Sandrine Géranton

UCL Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology

Sandrine Géranton is an Associate Professor in molecular neuroscience in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. Sandrine studied organic chemistry and biochemistry at the "Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier" in France. After an MSc in biotechnology at the University of the West of England, she joined University College London where she carried out a PhD in the then Department of Pharmacology. She went on learning about pain mechanisms as a post-doctoral researcher with the London Pain Consortium in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at UCL, where she is now Associate Professor.

Sandrine has always been keen on applying her multidisciplinary background to further her understanding of the molecular biology of pain states and she has been at the forefront of the investigation of the role of epigenetic mechanisms in the development of pain states. Her team has recently uncovered an important role for the stress regulator FKBP51 in the control of chronic pain states and the outcome of their research was published in Science Translational Medicine.

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NCN Communications Officer

Juliana Sporrer

Max planck UCL centre for computational psychiatry and Aging Research

Juliana is a PhD Student at the Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Aging Research and is supervised by Prof Dominik Bach. She is currently investigating the cognitive and neural control of action selection under threat using immersive virtual reality. Before that, she completed the Dual Masters in Brain and Mind Sciences ran by UCL, Ecole Normale Superieure, and Sorbonne University in Paris. Her academic interests lie in understanding subjective feelings such as emotions using computational models, and neuroimaging techniques.

Outside of her research, she is passionate about encouraging other postgraduate students to think about their future career, both within and outside of academia. Juliana is particularly excited by entrepreneurship and novel neurotechnologies.

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NCN Committee members

Paige Mumford,

UK Dementia Research Institute

Paige Mumford is a part-time PhD student and Research Assistant at the UK Dementia Research Institute at UCL. Paige completed her BA in Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley followed by a MSc in Neuroscience at UCL in Dr Frances Wiseman's lab, studying genetic mechanisms underlying amyloid-beta pathology in Alzheimer's disease-Down syndrome. Following her MSc, she stayed in Dr Wiseman's lab to do a PhD on how neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's Disease-Down syndrome is affected by the interferon hypersensitivity known to occur in the peripheral immune system of people with Down syndrome.

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Asaph Zylbertal,

Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology

Asaph is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Dr Isaac Bianco's lab, based in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology at UCL. He is studying how internal state and network dynamics shape behaviour, by combining in vivo experimental approaches in larval zebrafish and computational modelling.

Asaph studied Biology for his BSc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and stayed there for his MSc and PhD in neuroscience. His thesis (2017) focused on long-timescale information processing in the rodent accessory olfactory bulb, using whole-cell recordings, imaging and neuronal simulations.

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Freya Lygo-Frett,

Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience

Freya Lygo-Frett is a Lecturer (Teaching) at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Freya completed a BSc Psychology and MSc Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of York, before taking up a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging in the same department. The focus of her research is on understanding the neural basis for binocular vision in humans and what happens when it breaks down, such as in disorders like amblyopia (lazy eye).

On completing her PhD in 2019, Freya took up a position as an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of York, before joining UCL in 2020. Her current role is mainly responsible for providing teaching and supervision of students on the MSc / MRes Cognitive Neuroscience and BSc Psychology programmes. Additionally, she is actively involved with two research groups based at UCL: the Plasticity Lab (led by Prof Tamar Makin) and Child Vision Lab (led by Dr Tessa Dekker).

E-mail | Academic Profile

Humma Andleeb,

UCL-WELLCOME MENTAL HEALTH SCIENCE PHD PROGRAMME

Humma Andleeb is a PhD student on the UCL-Wellcome Mental Health Science PhD programme. After completing her undergraduate studies in Biochemistry and Neuroscience, she trained as a researcher at The McPin Foundation, working on a range of qualitative and quantitative research. She joined UCL in 2020 to combine her neuroscience background and mental health research work during her PhD. She is passionate about making academia more representative of the population, specifically by encouraging minoritised researchers to pursue neuroscience as an academic career as well as academia actively putting things in place that meet the needs and support that minoritised researchers require to advance within neuroscience and academia. She hopes that by being part of the UCL Neuroscience Careers Network, she will be able to help progress these aims.

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Lorenzo Fabrizi,

UCL Research Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology (NPP)

Lorenzo Fabrizi graduated in Biomedical Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano University (Italy) and in 2008 completed his PhD in Medical Physics and Bioengineering at UCL investigating the use of Electrical Impedance Tomography in epilepsy diagnosis. He then moved to the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology to explore the development of pain perception in human premature neonates in collaboration with the neonatal ward at UCLH using Electroencephalography (EEG).

Lorenzo is now a group leader funded by the Medical Research Council UK working at UCL and King's College London in collaboration with their main university hospitals to study the development of spontaneous neuronal activity and of the somatosensory system in premature neonates integrating EEG and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging information.

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Barbara Frias,

Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases at Queen Square Brain Bank (QSBB)

Barbara Frias is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases at Queen Square Brain Bank (QSBB). She is particularly focused on unravelling the potential use of radiotracers that could be use on PET imaging to detect early signs of neurogenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease or Frontotemporal Dementia.

She completed her PhD in Neurosciences in Portugal. During her PhD, she studied the contribution of neurotrophins NGF and BDNF to the development of bladder dysfunction in vivo in an animal model of spinal cord injury. She then moved to the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD), a spinal cord injury research centre in Vancouver, Canada, where she studied the effects of chronic high-level spinal cord injury on bowel dysfunction in animals. After two years, she moved to Umea, Sweden, to study the dynamics of brain structural plasticity during learning processes and postulating the hyposthesis of dopamine as an important link between changes in central myelination and Parkinson’s disease in vivo.

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Nicole Vissers,

SAINSBURY WELLCOME CENTRE

Nicole Vissers is a first-year PhD student at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre. Nicole studied biomedical sciences at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam and Neurosciences at both the VU and the University of Amsterdam. After these degrees, she joined the lab of Sonja Hofer to study how the various inhibitory neurons in the ventral geniculate nucleus (vLGN) regulate instinctive defensive behaviours.

Nicole is mainly interested in inhibition, plasticity, perception, and dynamical/complex systems. She is also passionate about philosophy and science education and communication

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