News and Events – April 2009
CONFERENCES
Kelly Hood (Canterbury Child Development Group) attended the Early Intervention Association of Aotearoa New Zealand (EIAANZ) conference, held at the Bruce Mason Centre in Auckland, 30th March – 1st April and presented the following seminar:
Hood K, Woodward L, and Champion P ‘Preschooler social competence as a predictor of later school adjustment amongst children born very preterm’.
INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION
Late last year, Richard Jones received an invitation for the Neurotechnology Research Group (www.neurotech.org.nz) to apply for participation in Europe’s COST Action ‘Advanced methods for the estimation of human brain activity and connectivity’, known as NeuroMath (www.neuromath.eu). COST is an intergovernmental framework for European COoperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research, and allows coordination of nationally-funded research on a European level. The goal of COST (www.cost.esf.org) is to ensure that Europe holds a strong position in the field of scientific and technical research for peaceful purposes by increasing European cooperation and interaction in this field. COST also includes a provision for membership by institutions from non-European countries, making COST a powerful tool for tackling topics of a global nature.
COST provides financial support for numerous actions, including NeuroMath. NeuroMath was started in 2007 and now has participating institutions from 23 countries in Europe. Its main objective is to increase knowledge on the mathematical methods able to estimate cortical activity and connectivity in the human brain from non-invasive neuroelectric and haemodynamic measurements.
The initial focus of the Neurotechnology Research Group’s collaborative efforts will be on the application, refinement, and validation of methods for estimation of human brain activity and connectivity as applied to identifying and understanding the complex sequence of brain processes underlying different types of lapses and the recovery thereof. This will be greatly facilitated by bilateral visits of researchers between COST members of NeuroMath and the Van der Veer Institute.
The Neurotechnology Research Group is particularly keen to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from 3 of the 4 working groups in the NeuroMath Action:
· Multimodal integration of neuroelectric and haemodynamic data
· Development of new techniques for the estimation of brain activity and connectivity
· Non-invasive study of motor and cognitive brain processes
The benefits of membership of NeuroMath will be (1) improved exposure and mechanisms for forming linkages with like-minded research groups in Europe, (2) the availability of funding from COST to help take one or more researcher to the biannual NeuroMath meetings, and (3) the availability of funding from COST to help bring world leaders in methods for estimation of human brain activity and connectivity to visit the Institute in Christchurch. In fact, two of the Italian members, Professor Fabio Babiloni and Dr Laura Astolfi, are international Associate Investigators on the Neurotechnology Research Group’s Marsden-funded Lapses of responsiveness project. Another member, Dr Bart Vanrumste (Belgium), spent 2001-2003 in New Zealand as a Postdoc with Richard Jones and Phil Bones. In return, it is hoped that NeuroMath will benefit from collaboration with the Neurotechnology Research Group and its skills and experience in lapses/drowsiness/sleep, EEG signal processing (event detection, source separation, localization), fMRI, and recording simultaneous-fMRI+EEG.
GRADUATIONS
Hannah Farr graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering with first class honours in Chemical and Process Engineering from the University of Canterbury on the 9th April. Hannah’s honours project was titled ‘Metabolic autoregulation in the human cerebro-vasculature’ and supervised by Tim David.