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Queen Square Inaugural Lectures: Professor Litvak and Professor Volynski
20 September 2022
UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology held its second inaugural lecture evening of 2022, on 13th September 2022, which was joined online and in person by many UK and international attendees
The first lecture was given by Professor Vladimir Litvak (Professor of Translational Neurophysiology, Imaging Neuroscience) entitled ” Towards understanding cortico-subcortical communication: a stimulating journey”
Prof. Litvak was born in Kyiv, Ukraine (former USSR). At the age of 15, he moved to Israel with his family where he got a B.Sc. in Biology and Computer Science followed by an M.Sc. in Brain Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He then moved to Haifa to do his PhD at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. During his PhD, he spent over a year working at the Neurology Department of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship holder.
After completing his PhD he joined the IoN in 2006 to work with Prof. Peter Brown and Prof. Karl Friston on simultaneous magnetoencephalography and intracranial recordings in Deep Brain Stimulation patients. He was subsequently offered a faculty position at the IoN Department of Imaging Neuroscience where he has been working since as a member of the Methods group and in recent years as the head of the Translational Neurophysiology research group.
"Looking back at my academic career I realise how much it was shaped on the one hand by serendipitous encounters and on the other hand by great mentors or just people who cared. As a professor at the IoN working at the intersection of fascinating and rapidly developing research fields of magnetoencephalography, neuromodulation and neuroimaging methods, I hope I will be able to pay this debt of gratitude forward by making a positive difference for my trainees and junior colleagues" Professor Vladimir Litvak
Professor Litvak was followed by Professor Kirill Volynski (Professor of Neuroscience, Clinical & Experimental Epilepsy) on “Mechanisms of neurotransmitter release in central synapses ”
Prof. Kirill Volynski joined the Institute of Neurology in 2004, and since then, he has been studying the molecular mechanisms that underlie neurotransmitter release and synaptic plasticity both in health and disease. During his lecture, Prof. Volynski described the novel experimental tools that his group developed over the last 15 years that allow them to image and modulate neurotransmitter release at the level of individual presynaptic terminals.
The lecture was introduced by Professor Michael Hanna (Director, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology) and votes of thanks given by Professor Karl Friston (Professor of Imaging Neuroscience, Imaging Neuroscience) and Professor Dimitri Kullmann (Professor of Neurology, Clinical & Experimental Epilepsy) respectively.
