News

Natalie Doig successfully defended her thesis entitled "Cortical and thalamic innervation of the striatum" on the 29th May 2012. Minor corrections have been requested by the examiners.

Natalie was supervised by Professor Paul Bolam. Her internal examiner was Zoltán Molnár, Professor of Developmental Neurobiology, Cerebral cortical development; and her external examiner was Enrico Bracci, senior lecturer at the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester.  

This year finally I have managed to reach agreement with the park services, that they do not mow on a fixed schedule the grassy areas in front of the Unit, but allow wild flowers to bring flowers for insects to feed on. The sad fact is that due to Hollywood and TV indoctrination, as well as to innate fear of the uncontrolled and the wild, most people like to see grassy areas mowed to 1 cm and monocultures, without wild plants, and consider that nice or even beautiful. But Nature’s variety is much more beautiful for those who have insight; those of us working on the brain, have some idea of beauty in nature.
 
As a result of the first unmowed spring a rare orchid, a White Helleborine (Cephalanthera damasonium) blooms under the birch trees. Just look at Ben’s picture! And the real thing! Please do not damage the plant, most of you will never see another one ever in your lives,

The seed of this orchid is carried by the wind and after germination the plant develops under ground for eight years in symbiosis with fungi. It cannot develop further without the appropriate mycorrhizal symbionts. It takes another 5-7 years of above ground development before the plant flowers for the first time. A real long-term project which is matched by some of my papers as time goes on.

Yours,

Peter Somogyi

Unit down in numbers but up in spirit in the Town and Gown 10 km race

Numbers were down this year, only the best and the strongest battled on from the Unit again in the 10 km Town and Gown fun charity run supporting the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign. On the 13th of May, Eleftheria Pissadaki (51.48) and Kristina Detzner (52:30) have overtaken Peter Somogyi (53:51) for the first time, while Kathryn Newton (54:35) made a dramatic 5 min improvement on last year. Marriage celebrations took their toll on Cristina Martinez-Gonzales, who nevertheless finished in a respectable (77:02) time on the warm May sunny day. The over 3000 runners watched in awe as Edao Veliy from Ethiopia broke the course record with an incredible 29:27 in the 31st race of this annual event. From the team of The MAGYARS, daughter Lilla came in fastest at 46:32, son Levente at 47:07, daughter in law Claire at 53:01 and girlfriend Beata at 61:48. Although Peter was down by 41 sec on last year’s time, he kept his grading at 61.21, proving yet again how good vintage improves with age.

View all Results.

After graduating in Econometrics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2008, Gido van de Ven completed an MA in Statistics at UC Berkeley in 2011. In Berkeley and Rotterdam, he focused on time series analysis, machine learning and, in particular, the estimation of causal interactions between brain regions from functional MRI data. In 2011 Gido moved to the University of Oxford commencing an MSc in Neuroscience. As part of this course he spent four months working with Dr Riikka Möttönen studying the role of the articulatory motor cortex during speech perception in a combined TMS/MEG-experiment.

Gido has joined the Unit for five months as a member of the Bolam lab. Under the supervision of Dr Juan Mena-Segovia he will be characterising the synaptic organisation of brainstem structures by means of the juxtacellular labeling technique.