Neuroscience@Nottingham 2024 brings together academics and clinicians

23rd Jan 2024

The Neuroscience@Nottingham Day took place on 10^th January 2024 and was, for the first time, jointly organized by colleagues from the University of Nottingham (Kim Chisholm and Adam Berrington) and Nottingham Trent University (Richard Hulse and Gareth Banks), with support from the University of Nottingham's BNA Local Group Representative. Over 100 neuroscientists from across the two Nottingham universities and hospitals attended the event, which brought together academics and clinicians to share ideas, perspectives and priorities in effective collaboration.

Could your local neuroscience community benefit from an event to support its innovation, collaboration, growth and development? If you're a BNA member, why not contact your Local Group Representative and make your idea a reality with up to £1000 in BNA funding?

The focus of the event was on new technologies to revolutionise neuroscience. The event was kicked off by Professor Michael Häusser from UCL with his key note on ‘Using light to read and write activity patterns in the brain’, which presented how recent work with the ‘All-optical toolkit’ revealed causal contributions of functionally identified neurons to distinct perceptual and cognitive functions.

This was followed by a number of quick fire talks on new methodological developments by colleagues in Nottingham and interactive workshops. The quick fire talks included presentations on new in vitro approaches, mathematical approaches, integrative multi-level analyses in rodent models and new translational imaging methods, including OPM-MEG, and brain stimulation approaches. The three interactive workshops dealt with Reproducibility in Neuroscience, Viral Vector Production and Application in Neuroscience and Novel tools to visualise nervous system function at Nottingham.

There was also a poster session where around 40 posters were presented on research ranging from molecular and cellular to cognitive, computational and clinical neuroscience. Three postgraduate poster prizes (sponsored by Cerca Magnetics) were awarded – based on popular vote – to:

• Rujuta Naik for her poster on “A Neurocognitive Approach to Prevent Non-Contact Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury in Football – A Scoping Review”
• Neave Smith for her poster on “The effect of postnatal morphine exposure on pain processing in adulthood”
• Jose-Pedro Manzano-Patron for his poster on “Denoising Diffusion MRI”

The Neuroscience@Nottingham research day also revealed exciting news of an upcoming pump priming fund in the order of £4,000. This fund will be available to all registered attendees, offering the opportunity to apply for financial support for innovative neuroscience research proposals. Cross-institutional collaborations between Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham were particularly encouraged.

The meeting and pump priming fund were supported by The University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University and a number of external sponsors (Promega, Cerca Magnetics and Miltenyi Biotec).

For further information about this and future events in Nottingham, check out the Neuroscience@Nottingham website: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/neuroscience/index.aspx