In the first of a series of blog posts about the UCL Neuroscience Symposium 2012, held on Friday 29 June, Post-doctoral Research Scientists Fiona Kerr and Oyinkan Adesakin (UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing and UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment) give a brief overview of the day in words and video, including their personal highlights.

We have both studied Alzheimer’s disease at UCL for several years but this, unbelievably, was our first time attending the annual UCL Neuroscience Symposium.

Upon popular recommendation from our colleagues as an interesting, inspiring and friendly meeting covering all aspects of neuroscience, the symposium certainly lived up to its reputation.

Speakers included experienced scientists as well as up-and-coming researchers, with seminars providing an interesting mix of current research within the historical context of the neuroscience field. Posters covered a wide-range of subjects – from how nerve cells function to diseases of the nervous system – with joint lab posters providing a good opportunity to find collaborators within the university.

Attracting over 800 attendees, including UCL scientists, neuroscience editors and commercial companies, this event underlined the powerhouse of research within neuroscience  at UCL.

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Ana Carolina Saraiva (ACS), a first year PhD student at the Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, and Xun Yu Choong (XYC), a first year student on the four-year PhD programme in Clinical Neuroscience, report on the 13th Queen Square Symposium, held on 16 March.

What began as a small event over a decade ago has developed to become the primary student-led conference in Queen Square (QS).

The QS Symposium is organised by students for students, bringing them together across departments, and aims to provide a platform to showcase the diversity of scientific research carried out in the UCL Institute of Neurology. The format for this was presenting posters about research projects.

This year showcased a variety of high-quality research, ranging from cognitive to clinical studies of neuroscience and neurology. How does the menstrual cycle affect perception of emotional faces? Are enlarged perivascular spaces on MRI a new imaging window for cerebral small vessel diseases?

This was an opportunity for the bright minds of the future to show us what they’ve got!

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