The FBS International Doctoral Student Engagement Fund Awardees are Announced!

The inaugural Faculty of Brain Sciences (FBS) International Doctoral Student Engagement Funds (IDSEF) support FBS academics supervising doctoral students with collaborators based in other countries. Doctoral students are often the engines of research, facilitating international collaboration with their thesis projects. This fund supports such international collaboration at UCL. This year, the IDSEF supported three students:

Mateo Gende

Mateo Gende was born in Spain in 1995. He received his BSc. in Computer Engineering in 2018, and his MSc. in Bioinformatics in 2021 from the University of La Coruña, Spain, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Since 2018, he has been working as a researcher within the Centre for Research in Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC) in Spain. His main research interests include computer vision, medical image analysis, pattern recognition, and machine learning. His project will focus on longitudinal analysis of multimodal ophthalmic images through deep learning, and he will be supervised by Prof. Pearse Keane from the Institute of Opthamology.

Musambo Kapapa

Musambo Kapapa is an ICGNMD PhD Fellow and a highly qualified physiotherapist at University Teaching Hospital (UTH), Lusaka. Ms Kapapa has broad interests across NMDs and physiotherapy. Her PhD is titled: The development of an evidence-based genetic neuromuscular diseases management protocol for physiotherapists focused on physiotherapy practices, patients, and family experiences in Zambia. Her project will focus on developing physiotherapy clinical practice and clinical trial readiness for functional assessment for people living with genetic neuromuscular diseases in Zambia, and she will be supervised by Dr. Gita Ramdharry from the Institute of Neurology.

Mafalda Mascarenhas

Mafalda Mascarenhas is a PhD candidate in LiSP – Lisbon Doctoral Program in Social Psychology with a studentship from the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT). Her research aims to understand the sociopsychological factors that influence teachers’ recommendations for professional education (vs. scientific-humanistic high-school diplomas) for Black students, namely the role that behavior in the classroom and achievement have on those recommendations. Her project will focus on the impact of teachers’ perceptions of students’ agency on school paths, and she will be supervised by Prof. Lasana Harris from the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences.