What does NeuroTech mean? How do you turn your ideas into a commercial product - and how do you develop the technology and neuroscience needed to build it?

Join us on Tuesday, November 28th to hear from Emilé Radyté, PhD student at Oxford and founder/CEO of Samphire Neuroscience. Samphire Neuro has developed a non-invasive neuromodulatory tool to relieve menstrual pain & symptoms of PMS, PMDD, PCOS, and endometriosis. This will be the first drug- and hormone-free treatment: and it’s almost on the market!

About: the event

Hear about advancements in women’s health & building a neurotechnology company! Learn about the journey from idea → pitching investors → building the device → market launch → targeting the right market. We’ll also discuss transitioning from academia to industry, and balancing entrepreneurship with being a student.

About: the company

Samphire Neuro is a neurotechnology company dedicated to maximising the well-being of women during key stages of life: menstruation, the fourth trimester, and menopause. They see the gap left by conventional treatments and understand that they are not enough. That’s why they are forging a new path - grounded in research, neuroscience and the lived experiences of women. They have built the world's first Menstrual Neuromodulation Therapy (MNT) via their proprietary headband. The headband sends low-current electrical pulses to specific brain regions. This non-invasive neuromodulation technology is clinically proven to promote neuroplasticity and alleviate symptoms of chronic pain, depression, and anxiety. Upon launch, their device will be the first medical-grade, drug and hormone-free solution to alleviate core symptoms associated with PMS, PMDD, PCOS, and endometriosis.

About: the speaker

Emilé graduated from Harvard with a B.A in Neuroscience & Social Anthropology. She then went to Oxford for an MSc in Neuroscience, and now a PhD in Neurobiology and Neuroscience. Click here to read some of Em’s articles about women’s health, entrepreneurship, and neuroscience. Click here to view her research papers.

About: the science

Samphire Neuro’s technology is based around transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS. The headband stimulates cortical areas related to pain in order to decrease pain perception and reduce pain sensitivity. Have a look at the trial paper here, this paper on tDCS over the motor cortex (M1), or a review of tDCS for pain intervention.

Most of you likely indulged in a halloween event this month - but did you stop to wonder about the neurobiology underlying scary costumes, horror movie jumpscares, and threats?

Wonder no more on November 14th! Instead, join us for a panel on the Neuroscience of Fear and Horror: Monsters, Horror Movies, and Spooooky Brain Networks!

Our speakers are Juliana Sporrer from the Threat Avoidance lab at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, and Peter Kirk from the Neuroscience and Mental Health group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Join us November 14th at 18:00 in Torrington Place, B17 to discuss questions such as:

• Why are some people more easily scared than others?

• Why are jump scares so much scarier than a threat you can see coming?

• Can we smell fear?

• What parts of the brain experience horror - and how do we measure it?

• What is the scariest thing a human can experience?

Please arrive by 17:55 to give yourself time to find the room, and so that we can start at 18:00! The discussion will last for ~45 minutes, followed by open questions from the audience - so feel free to ask away!

You can sign up for this event through the link in our bio, as well as on our website. Please remember that you’ll need a valid NeuroSoc membership to attend:)

Lastly, here is some extra info on our speakers - although you can find this info on our website as well.

Peter Kirk is a postdoctoral researcher at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Neuroscience and Mental Health group. Peter holds a BSc in Psychology, an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience, and PhD in the ecological study of the brain, and has used movies (combined with fMRI imaging) to probe the neurobiology underlying fear, threat detection, and anxiety. The Neuroscience and Mental Health group also looks at how anxiety impacts temporal cognition, risk aversion, and brain dynamics.

Juliana Sporrer is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and holds a BSc in Clinical Psychology and an MSc in Brain and Mind Sciences. Juliana works in the Threat Avoidance lab, and researches human escape behaviours, survival actions, and threat forecasting. Recently, the lab has started using virtual reality (VR) games with a motion-capture system to analyse behaviour under threat - as well as the strategies we employ to escape from (virtual) horrors.

See you there!

Party and Custome competition - Collaboration with UCL AI Society
Tickets: purchase via UCL Student Union

Talk to students from KCL summer school about life at UCL neuroscience.

Discuss neuroscience about Halloween - consciousness, fear, and emotion.

Watching 2001: Space Odyssey with UCL AI Society

Join us on March 15th for an exclusive tour of the Imperial College Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s Tissue Bank!

You’ll learn about (and see) various brain samples and pathologies with director Steve Gentleman, and observe a fixed brain dissection of an MS or Parkinson’s case. This is a great opportunity for those interested in pathology, anatomy, or brain banking as a whole! Due to the nature of the tour, this event is limited to 15 spaces. Make sure to sign up ASAP using the eventbrite link: (available soon)

We’ll be meeting in the George Farha Café at 15:00 to travel to Hammersmith Hospital together - travel will take approximately 40 minutes. Alternatively, you can meet us at the hospital entrance at 15:50.

After the event, we’ll travel back to campus and head to the Institute Bar around 18:30 

Learn about the latest research in oligomerization and mitochondrial dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease

Dr Sonia Gandhi is a Group Leader at The Francis Crick Institute and a Professor of Neurology at UCL. Her research focuses on understanding various cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration, especially in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Her team focuses on protein misfolding and mitochondrial dysfunction. 

Recently, she partnered with a group of synthetic chemists and produced a molecule called “CAP-1” that binds with high affinity to protein oligomers and could be used in the future to detect and characterise the aggregates that initiate and drive the development of neurodegenerative disorders like PD. 

Join us in-person in the A V Hill LT, Medical Sciences to learn about the current research on neurodegeneration and protein misfolding!

Explore science illustration and its importance in science communication.

Dr Gill Brown is a former geophysicist, now graphic designer and illustrator, as well as active researcher. On one hand, she works with scientists to create effective figures and other forms of visual communications. On the other, she is also a researcher on the field of scientific visual communication and has a PhD that investigates the issues when producing scientific conceptual figures and suggests how to address them. During her PhD she collaborated with the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences at King’s College London and lead workshops designed to help researchers with creating efficient visual elements for the divulgation of their research.

Join us in-person at Bentham House LG17 to learn about neuroscience illustration and the importance of effective graphic design in science.

Dr Gill’s website: https://graphical-science.com/

Welcome to our first ever international collaboration webinar with Hong Kong Student Association of Neuroscience. This is a preliminary event happening as a taster for the upcoming UCL x HKSAN Brain Symposium planned for July this year.

Joining us are Dr Stephanie Koch, UCL and Dr Sau Ching Stanley Wong, HKU.

Dr Koch is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Sensorimotor Neuroscience. Her research primarily focuses on increasing understanding of how the nervous system learns to interact with the environment in order to allow specific and precise movements to be recruited.

Her presentation title is “Touch, Pain and Itch: how we learn to navigate the world” :

“We use our sense of touch, pain and itch to know how to accurately respond to our environment be it by moving away from pain or by removing an itch, but how does the body know how to move in response to each cue? Our somatosensory system is precisely wired to allow us to protect ourselves and this wiring is set up after birth as a function of experience. Here we will discuss the circuits underlying touch, pain and itch and how we can use our understanding of postnatal development to reveal how these circuits can miswire after injury.”

~Koch, 2023

Dr Wong is a Clinical associate professor working in pain medication, cardio protection and basic pain signalling pathways at Queen Mary Hospital, HK. He is a well known professor in his field, especially for anaesthesiology and pain modulation, and has a plethora of published landmark studies in these fields.

He will be joining us all the way from Hong Kong with a fantastic presentation on pain in a clinical setting.

Feel free to sign up to the link and join us!

This week’s journal club will be covering papers about cultural diversity. It will be highly dicussion based - your interpretation of what each paper means and its importance in academia will be greatly anticipated!

Location: Torrington G13

Come in, listen to, and talk to UCL professors from various STEM fields and diverse backgrounds, such as Luciano Rila and Talvinder Sihra.

Location: Jeremy Bentham House, SB31 Denys Holland LT

Join us for some pizza and games to get to know each other!

We will discuss various diversity topics such as neurodiversity, ethnic diversity, and LGBTQ+ issues.

Location: IOE Nunn Hall

Explore science illustration and its importance in science communication

Dr Gill Brown is a former geophysicist, now graphic designer and illustrator, as well as active researcher. On one hand, she works with scientists to create effective figures and other forms of visual communications. On the other, she is also a researcher on the field of scientific visual communication and has a PhD that investigates the issues when producing scientific conceptual figures and suggests how to address them. During her PhD she collaborated with the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences at King’s College London and lead workshops designed to help researchers with creating efficient visual elements for the divulgation of their research.

Join us in-person (location TBD) to learn about neuroscience illustration and the importance of effective graphic design in science.

Join us at the first ever UCL STEM BALL. The only interdisciplinary Science Ball at UCL, and all UCL Students are welcome (you do not have to be a member of any of the societies below to attend).

Get a free drink and several canapés on arrival! There will be a DJ and music throughout the evening! Come along to one of the biggest UCL formals of the year and don't miss out on first release tickets!!

The following societies have created STEM BALL: AI society, Bio-chemistry society, Biology Society, Natural Sciences Society, Neuroscience society, Space Society, Physics society and UCL Science Magazine.

In collaboration with the Dementia Research Society, we present Cliona Farrell, a PhD student at UCL that works on understanding neuroinflammation in individuals with Down Syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease

Clíona Farrell is a PhD student at UCL working on early onset dementia in individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) in Frances Wiseman’s lab. She has an undergraduate degree in Neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin and worked as a research assistant in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where she studied ALS and Parkinson’s disease. 

In Frances Wiseman’s lab she studies Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in people with Down Syndrome, focusing on understanding neuroinflammation in DS before developing Alzheimer’s and as a result of it. To do this she uses mouse models for DS, human post-mortem brain tissue and she even generates organotypic brain slice cultures.

There are around 6 million people living with Down syndrome in the world, and many of them develop early onset dementia. Individuals with AD-DS show greater levels of amyloid beta build up in the brain than those with just AD. Not only this but people with DS have an increased risk of infectious and autoimmune diseases, therefore inflammation could also play a role in AD-DS.

Join us in-person at Bentham house SB31 Denys Holland Lecture Theatre to hear about the latest research on AD-DS!

Dr Jasmine Donaldson is a research fellow in neurodegenerative diseases at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. She is a member of the esteemed Tabrizi lab, led by professor Sarah Tabrizi, in which leading research is conducted into Huntington’s disease, with an ultimate goal of reliable treatment and prevention for such a destructive condition.

Huntington’s disease, also known as Huntington’s chorea, is a neurodegenerative disease that is most frequently inherited from a parent. It is progressive, and symptoms often begin between ages 30-50, often displaying as psychiatric abnormalities first, with cognitive and hyperkinetic motor symptoms displaying later on. It is caused by a trinucleotide repeat expansion of CAG repeats in the Huntingtin gene, which encodes the huntingtin protein, causing the synthesis of a mutated protein that gradually damages neurons in crucial areas of the brain. Such an abominable disease is a horrific ordeal for families to go through, hence the Tabrizi lab and Dr Jasmine Donaldson’s research is so important.

Please join us at (location TBD) to hear all about Huntington’s disease and a potential new avenue for its prevention!

Link to primary paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211124721010925?via%3Dihub

Professor Tamar Makin is a professor of cognitive neuroscience here at UCL, and acts as the group leader of the plasticity research group. She strives to understand the key influences affecting the reorganisation of the adult brain, primarily studying individuals who have suffered hand loss to do this. In particular, professor Makin and the plasticity lab focus on the habitual uses of prosthetic limbs to discover how such artificial body parts result in brain augmentation. At our event, professor Makin will be primarily discussing her recent paper ‘Robotic hand augmentation drives changes in neural body representation’, which is a fascinating research paper displaying her labs fantastic and groundbreaking research on brain reorganisation. With a primary goal to have a positive clinical impact on amputees and clinical populations alike, professor Makin’s research is making headway into understanding the re-networking of the brain.

Please join us in person at Medawar Building G02 Watson Lecture Theatre for a really exciting first journal club of the year! 

Link to primary paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abd7935

Hear about the career of a UCL Neuroscience Alumnus, from studying and interning in labs to doing his PhD and co-founding his own academy.

Dr Matthew Phillips is a UCL Alumnus who also was the NeuroSoc president! After working in various labs like the Mann lab in Oxford and the Edwards lab and Hausser Lab in UCL; he went on to complete a PhD in Experimental and Theoretical Systems Neuroscience at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. During his PhD he worked at the Branco Lab, which focuses on producing mechanistic models to understand how neurons in the brain compute behaviours that promote survival. 

Dr Phillips also created Learney, a personalized learning platform where you can create your own learning roadmaps to track your progress, also helping others learn too. Finally, he is the co-founder of Delta Academy, a programme that teaches coding through games and AI competitions. 

Join us in-person at Torrington Place G13 to hear about the experience of a former UCL Neuroscience student, from his internships and PhD to his entrepreneurial endeavors like creating Learney and co-founding Delta Academy!

Join us for our next event in Careers Week to talk about internships! We have a special panel event for those looking to get an internship in science, with our panellists who are current students and who can give tips on applications, as well as relay their experiences to you.

This event will be held on 16th November at 6pm, as always in the AV Hill Lecture Theatre.