BC Neuroscience Day

Paetzold Auditorium, Vancouver General Hospital 899 West 12th Avenue, Vancouver

Forum at which faculty from the BC Neuroscience community present topics along with an invited professor/Keynote speaker.


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Danqing Zhu candidate presentation

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Gene therapy, the delivery of genetic material to the cells of a patient for therapeutic benefit, has been increasingly successful over the past decade. The most successful gene delivery vectors are based on adeno-associated viruses (AAV), a naturally derived protein-based and self-assembled ‘nanoparticle’. Although these natural ‘nanoparticles’ are safe and non-pathogenic, they present several barriers […]


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Dr. Rutsuko Ito: Ventral hippocampal circuits and the arbitration of approach-avoidance conflict

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Approach-avoidance (AA) conflict resolution is a form of decision making that is fundamentally important for survival and requires the effective evaluation of affective stimuli or events with mixed outcomes (positive and negative). Despite the prevailing view of hippocampal involvement in learning and memory processes, the hippocampus is also thought to be involved in the resolution […]


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Tatsuya Tsukahara candidate presentation

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

To interpret the sensory world and select appropriate actions, animals must distinguish persistent background stimuli from novel sensory cues. Sensory adaptation is a neural mechanism that enables such filtering of environmental stimuli, and a fundamental feature of sensory systems. Previous studies have shown that the brain flexibly adapt sensory responses to repetitive stimuli through synaptic […]


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Dr. Kate Wassum: Amygdala circuitry in reward learning and decision making

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

To make adaptive decisions we must cast ourselves into the future and consider the outcomes of our potential choices. This prospective consideration is informed by our memories. I will discuss our lab’s recent work investigating the neural circuits responsible for encoding, updating, and retrieving reward memories for use in the considerations underlying decision making. We […]


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Science Communication Career Workshop

Online

Are you interested in science communication as a career but aren’t sure how to make it happen? Join the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health and the Women’s Health Research Cluster on March 18th, from 12-1pm to learn more! This event will feature a panel of three science communicators, all with diverse backgrounds, who will […]


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Majid Mohajerani candidate presentation

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Spontaneous activity accounts for most of what the brain does and is likely to be key for information processing in the brain, but its function is still quite mysterious. Two key spontaneous activity processes are the Default Mode Network (DMN), a set of areas that are most markedly connected and active during behavioural idleness, and […]


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Dr. Edward F. Chang: Towards a Speech Neuroprosthetic

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Speaking is a unique and defining human behavior.  Over the past decade, we have focused on deciphering the basic neural code that underlies our ability to speak fluently. During speech production, vocal tract movement gestures for all speech sounds are encoded by highly specialized neural activity, organized as a map, in the human speech motor […]


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Heart rate variability (HRV) correlates of functional MRI in humans

DMCBH Room 3402 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

This month, Komal Bharti from the Vila-Rodriguez lab in the Department of Psychiatry will present on "Heart rate variability (HRV) correlates of functional MRI in humans." Zoom link if unable to attend in person:  https://ubc.zoom.us/j/5747966049?pwd=N1ppY2tUS3o4bk9vTkFSTzBna3k0Zz09 Meeting ID: 574 796 6049 Passcode: 052059


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Dr. Bojana Stefanovic: Neurovascular unit dysfunction in a model of TBI

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is the most common type of traumatic brain injury globally. Although its consequences may be short term, mTBI often leads to long-term neuropsychiatric and neurological impairments and has been estimated to increase the probability of later life dementia up to six-fold. It is presently not clear what neuropathological changes underlie […]


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Dr. Shigeki Watanabe: Ultrafast recycling of synaptic vesicles

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

In 1973 John Heuser and Tom Reese demonstrated that neurotransmitter was released from neurons via the fusion of neurotransmitter-filled vesicles with the cell membrane.  But at the same time, these experiments launched a controversy that is unresolved today – do vesicles collapse into the membrane and are then recycled slowly on the order of 20 […]


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Dr. Pascal Kaeser: Mechanisms and Roles for Fast Dopamine Signaling

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Dopamine is a neuromodulator that codes information on various time scales. I will discuss recent progress on the identification of fast release mechanisms for dopamine in the mouse striatum. I will present data on triggering mechanisms of dopamine release and evaluate its roles in striatal regulation. In the long-term, our work will allow for a better understanding of the mechanisms and […]


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Neuroscience Research Colloquium

The Neuroscience Research Colloquium (NRC), is a series of lectures featuring local and international neuroscientists.