I’m thrilled to be part of a the leadership team for the Enabling Technologies theme with the Epilepsy Research Institute UK. This is an opportunity to maximise the use and utility of novel and emerging technologies for the benefit of patients and the epilepsy research community, and I could not be more thrilled to be involved. If you want to contribute - do get in touch!
AES 2023 /
My first time in Florida could not have been for a better reason - had a blast at AES, reconnecting with old friends and making plenty new ones. It was great getting extra mentorship through the AES fellows program, too - definitely makes me want to come back next year!
SfN 2023 /
We were well represented at SfN this year, with Ulrich and Jack both presenting some of their PhD work, and Dynamic Brains alumnus Dom presenting at a nano-symposium on his new exciting postdoc endeavors.
New Action Medical Research funded project /
We are all very excited to have been awarded funding from Action Medical Research to develop and investigate zebrafish models of B6-dependent epilepsies, a potentially devastating early onset epilepsy. This is a collaboration with the great zebrafish crew at UCL, and could lead to identifying new treatment strategies.
Congrats Aswin on his PhD /
Huge congratulations ot the newly minted Dr (well Mr. Dr. Dr. - what does a surgeon-scientist go by?) Chari! Flew threw his viva with flying colours and is now out in the world as a real leader in theb epilepsy research community. Congrats!
Making waves at AES 2022 /
It’s been such a blast bringing together a bunch of zebrafish researchers and discuss allm things epilepsy research at our investigator workship at AES. Really grateful for the kind reception and fruitful discussion, and excited about what the future holds for the field.
Dynamic Brains at the BSCN annual meeting /
The British Society for Clinical Neurophysiology invited Ulrich to talk about his work on modelling intracranial dynamics using receptor density distributions - a big chunk of his PhD work. Thanks for the invitation and the great questions!
Dr Burrows in the house /
Huge congratulations Dominic, who hast just finished his PhD with a bang! The examiners were truly impressed, as were we all - and excited to hear about what the newly minted Dr Burrows gets up to next!
P.S. If you are curious what the book is that seemed the obvious gift choice for the occasion, check it out.
Northern explorations /
What a fantastic meeting - it was a total joy participating at the Trondheim Fish Imaging meeting and hearing all things zebrafish (and some other species too!) from such a diverse and exciting group of researchers. Had an absolute blast and am really looking forward to hearing what everyone will get up to in the years to come!
And as a plus - I also got to see Björk live in concert!
Neuromatch Academy 2020 /
Never would I have imagined that the prospect of several weeks solidly spent on zoom would look in any way appealing, but 2020 really teaches you something! I’m really happy to play a minor role in the massive machine that is Neuromatch academy: for 3 weeks, 2000+ students will work through in-depth tutorials, teaching them various computational neuroscience methods. And what’s even better - the whole material will be accessible online, for free! Such exciting times where a field comes together to reduce the barriers for people to engage with some of the most fascinating questions in neuroscience!
The Young Epilepsy paediatric epilepsy research retreat /
This is the first year that we have joint the annual paediatric epilepsy research retreat after l have left UCL. Dom Burrows did a fantastic job in introducing the interdisciplinary crowd of clinicians and researchers to zebrafish models of epilepsy and what they can do - and boy did he get a reception. Believe it or not, several limericks where penned in celebration of zebrafish during the two day retreat! We will definitely be back!
Ronnie MacKeith Prize Lecture in Belfast /
I always thought the list of previous prize winners of the Ronnie MacKeith prize read like the who-is-who in academic paediatric neurologists in the UK. I can’t even express what an honour it was, to be added to this list and present some of the work on childhood epilepsies that I have been involved with. This was also an opportunity to think back and consider all the people that have helped me along the way - which is how this slide came to be. Definitely one of my favourite slides to make to date!
Thanks again BPNA for the prize and the opportunity to present in this fantastic setting in Belfast!
Ronnie MacKeith Lecture - just announced! /
It’s fair to say I’m very chuffed with these news! Just heard that I’ll be joining an impressive (intimidating?) list of UK child neurologists (https://bpna.org.uk/?page=mackeith-prize-lecturers) that have been received the Ronnie MacKeith prize. That’s because the BPNA just invited me to give the prize lecture at next January’s British Paediatric Neurology Association’s Annual Meeting. Very excited to say the least - and for those of you interested in new approaches to understanding childhood epilepsy, you should come and join us in Belfast early in the new year!
Putting the Dynamics in my Dynamic Poster in Chicago at SfN /
For the second time, I had the opportunity to present a dynamic poster at SfN - this means you get a screen that’s about poster-size and can use that to display your poster, but this time with some dynamic content. I usually put some videos, but also use the opportunity to have some fun with R Shiny Apps to make interactive graphs.
You can see what this looks like in the wild here: https://dafishcode.github.io/SfN19/ (note that I haven’t particularly tested this very well and it mainly works in fullscreen Safari, somehow Chrome is really bed with the video embeddings). You can also see the actual code used to make this on github here: https://github.com/dafishcode/SfN19
The Sundance of Epilepsy /
At a different conference last year, I heard about the Park City Epilepsy Meeting. Having never before heard of either Park City, Utah (turns out, Sundance film festival is there) or the meeting, this was an amazing discovery: This was the second iteration of a brilliant conference bringing together a variety of epilepsy researchers (and thanks to conference co-convener Scott Baraban, many fish epilepsy researchers, too). And in addition to the beautiful surroundings of mountainous northern Utah, they had done brilliantly with their fundraising - offering a whole host of travel awards to early-career researchers, meaning that both me and my student Dominic were able to attend and present our work!
SPM for EEG and MEG (three days of three-letter acronyms) /
Time flies when you’re haivng fun - it’s that time of the year again, when everyone gathers around Queen Square and spends three intense days learning and practicing EEG and MEG analysis using SPM. A great opportunity to pick up some new tips (including from me), and meet old friends - current and ex FIL-fellows from all over the world.
Epilepsy Research UK Expert Workshop /
You don’t get the opportunity to hear your favourite epilepsy researchers come together and speak about their ground breaking work. It’s even rarer to be invited to join them and present some of your own work. It has been a real pleasure to be able to present some first data from our zebrafish model of epileptic seizure at the ERUK Expert Workshop on Epilepsy and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. This was a first opportunity to show some of our single-cell resolution data from the newer fish lines, and I think it went down well! Looking forward to many more workshops in the future!
British Paediatric Neurology Association (BPNA) Annual Conference /
January is always a busy time of the year - everyone is coming back from holiday-hibernation, and then there are the yearly Young Epilepsy Research Retreat from the UCL Epilepsy Research teams, closely followed by the BPNA Annual Conference. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity this year to take some work back to the conference, that could have only happened because I was introduced to the right collaborator at this very conference a few years back.
Thanks again to Ming Lim for making the introduction to Sukhvir Wright - brilliant child neurologist and neuroscientist looking into autoimmune causes of epilepsy. This chance(ish) meeting has spawned the work that has only recently come out in our PNAS paper. Here is me talking to a room full of child neurologists about our finding in regards to cortical dynamics in mice and in kids under NMDAR-Ab exposure.
Aston University Birmingham /
It’s been a great pleasure presenting some of our work at Aston University in Birmingham, and catch up with long-term collaborators there. There’s some exciting research on epilepsy in different animal models coming out of Aston, and I’m looking forward to some of their new work coming out in print soon!
Gordon Research Conference 2018: Epilepsy /
After having heard lots and lots of talk about this conference at various epilepsy-related gatherings last year, I decided to bite the bullet and sign up for the Gordon Research Conference and Seminar on Mechanisms of Epilepsy and Neural Synchronization. The speakers look like a great mix of theoretical neuroscientists, clinician-scientists and experimental neurobiologists. Plus it's set in glorious Vermont, the land of cheese and maple syrup.
P.S. Turns out I've been invited to give a short presentation on our modelling work on the intracranial EEG recordings for our epilepsy surgery patients.