News and Events – April 2008
PUBLICATIONS
Pritchard VE, Neumann E (in press). Avoiding the potential pitfalls of using negative priming tasks in developmental studies: Assessing inhibitory control in children. Developmental Psychology.
Van Hese P, Vanrumste B, Hallez H, Carroll GJ, Vonck K, Jones RD, Bones PJ, D’Asseler Y, Lemahieu I (in press). Detection of focal epileptiform events in the EEG by spatio-temporal dipole clustering. Clinical Neurophysiology.
Wolff M, Loukavenko E, Will BE, Dalrymple-Alford JC. (in press). The extended hippocampal-diencephalic memory system: Enriched housing promotes recovery of the flexible use of spatial representations after anterior thalamic lesions. Hippocampus.
CONFERENCES
Juliane Wilcke presented a poster at the 15th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, USA.
Wilcke JC, O’Shea RP, Watts R. (2008). Binocular rivalry: Structural connectivity and a truly nonrivalrous comparison condition. Annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, USA (12-15 April).
EVENTS
The Van der Veer Institute Brain Research Forum was held on Monday 7th April, 2008 in the Beaven Lecture Theatre. Professor Tim David, Director for the Centre for Bioengineering, University of Canterbury presented “Auto-regulation models for perfusion of the cerebro-vasculature”.
GRANTS
Richard Jones, Govinda Poudel, Carrie Innes, Philip Bones, John Dalrymple-Alford, Fabio Babiloni, and Laura Astolfi have been advised of their having made it through to the Full Proposal stage with their Preliminary Research Proposal to the Marsden Fund for the study ‘Losing the struggle to stay awake: What happens in the brain during a lapse of responsiveness?’
Govinda Poudel received a $1500 grant-in-aid from the Maurice and Phyllis Paykel Trust to put towards his attendance at the 14th Annual Meeting of the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping which will be held in Melbourne, Australia (June 15-19, 2008).
Govinda Poudel received a $2000 grant-in-aid from the University of Otago, Division of Health Sciences to put towards his attendance at the 30th IEEE International Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference which will be held in Vancouver, Canada (August 20-24, 2008).
GRADUATIONS
LiPyn Leow graduated on 18th April with a PhD in Speech and Language Therapy from the Department of Communication Disorders at University of Canterbury. Her thesis was titled ‘Mechanisms of Airway Protection in Ageing and Parkinson’s Disease” and supervised by Maggie‑Lee Huckabee and Tim Anderson.
AWARDS
Mathieu Wolff, who spent 3 years as a post-doc until October 2007 with John Dalrymple-Alford’s group working on thalamus and memory, was ranked “first” in section 27 of the CNRS which is labelled “Comportement, Cognition, Cerveau” (behaviour, cognition, brain; effectively “behavioural and cognitive neuroscience”) when he applied for a highly prestigious research position as a “Chargé de Recherche” in the French national science research organisation (CNRS). The CNRS provide highly competitive tenured “research-only” positions. Mathieu will be working with Dr. Bruno Bontempi’s group in Bordeaux. Dr. Bontempi and Mathieu will continue to develop their collaborations with John Dalrymple-Alford, which is likely also to involve several other research groups with a view to learning the neuroscience correlates of recovery from memory loss after thalamic injury (Toulouse, Strasbourg, Cardiff, Dunedin).
APPOINTMENTS
Richard Jones has been invited and appointed to Co-chair the “Neural Engineering, Neuromuscular systems and Rehabilitation Engineering” Theme at the 30th IEEE International Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference in Vancouver, Canada (20-24 August, 2008). The conference is the world’s premier annual conference on biomedical engineering and the Society is the largest international society of biomedical engineers.
PUBLICITY
The NeuroTech Team was featured on TV ONE’s Close Up (14 Apr 2008) report on ‘Microsleeps’ – based upon the NeuroTech Team’s world-first functional image of what happens in the brain during a microsleep (via simultaneous-fMRI+EEG+Tracking+EyeMovements). The report can be viewed at: http://www.vanderveer.org.nz/media/index.php