Connecting over 500 neuroscience researchers and students across UCL.
The 14th Annual UCL Neuroscience Symposium took place on Tuesday 13th June 2023. The symposium attracted over 500 researchers and students, ranging from early career researchers to professors, and undergraduates to PhD students. The symposium connected the neuroscience research community at UCL, showcasing its leading work across a range of disciplines. The symposium’s breadth directly reflected the aims of the UCL Neuroscience Domain: to promote communication and engagement in neuroscience, both internally and externally; and facilitate world-class neuroscience research across UCL.
The symposium included poster sessions with over 114 posters spanning cognition and behaviour, developmental neuroscience, disorders of the nervous system, homeostatic and neuroendocrine systems, neural excitability, synapses and glia, novel methods, resources and technology development, and sensory and motor systems.
Session 1 Keynote Talks
Homeoboxes and neuronal identity control
Professor Oliver Hobert
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Columbia University
Dr Oliver Hobert is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). He did his graduate work with Gerhard Krauss at the University of Bayreuth in Germany and Axel Ullrich at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany and his postdoc with Gary Ruvkun at Harvard Medical School on Boston. He has been on the faculty at Columbia University since 1999 and with the HHMI since 2005. He is a recipient of the Mossman Award, the Jacob Javits Award and is an elected fellow of the AAAS.
The influence of environment geometry on developing neural maps of space
Dr Thomas Wills
Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, UCL Faculty of Life Sciences
After graduating in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, and working for one year with Dr Tim Bliss, Tom joined UCL in 2000, to undertake a PhD in the laboratory of Prof John O’Keefe. He has remained at UCL ever since, becoming a group leader in 2011, after being awarded a University Research Fellowship by the Royal Society. This was followed by a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship, awarded in 2020. Tom’s work focuses on hippocampal circuits underlying memory and navigation, with a focus on the post-natal development of these systems.
The Role of Social Interaction in Learning: Behavioural and Neural Mechanisms
Dr Sara De Felice, Former PhD student, Jon Driver Prize Winner, Department of Psychology and Language Sciences, Faculty of Brain Sciences, UCL and now Research Associate at the University of Cambridge.
Session 2 Keynote Talks
On-demand cell-autonomous gene therapy for brain circuit disorders
Dr Gabriele Lignani, Associate Professor, Clinical & Experimental Epilepsy, UCL, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences, UCL Neuroscience Domain
Dr Gabriele Lignani is an Associate Professor at UCL. He received his PhD in 2012 at the Italian Institute of Technology. Then he was awarded a Marie-Curie individual fellowship at UCL to develop the first CRISPR-based editing tools to treat epilepsy. In 2018 he started his own lab as ERUK Emerging Leader to further develop novel therapies. Recently he has been awarded the Harinarayan Young Scientist Award and the Michael Prize for his contribution to progress in Epilepsy. The focus of his lab is to develop gene therapy/editing techniques for neurological disorders and understand the basic epileptic mechanisms.
From theory to mechanism: how the hippocampus learns predictive maps
Early Career Prize Lecture – Junior Category, Tom George, PhD Student, Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL
Recurrent network interactions explain tectal response variability and experience-dependent behaviour
Early Career Prize Lecture – Advanced Category
Dr Asaph Zylbertal, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology, UCL
Session 3 Keynote Talks
Genomics of neurodegeneration: on the way to therapies
Professor Sir John Hardy, Chair of the Molecular Biology of Neurological Disease, Neurodegenerative Diseases, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences
Professor Sir John Hardy FRS is a human geneticist and molecular biologist, and Chair of the Molecular Biology of Neurological Disease at the Reta Lila Weston Institute of Neurological Studies, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, UCL. His research focuses on the genetic analysis of disease and has produced leading work on the genetic analysis of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. More recent research has also focused on Parkinson’s disease, other movement disorders, and motor neuron disease.
Professor Hardy was the first to identify the role of amyloid in Alzheimer’s disease, which now, three decades later, has resulted in a drug that may slow down the rate of cognitive decline and help patients. The drug, lecanemab, and its implications have been marked as a turning point in Alzheimer’s research and treatment. Professor Hardy was knighted in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to “human health in improving our understanding of dementia and neurodegenerative diseases.”
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