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29 K. Varnali Str. Chalandri, Athens, Greece, www.convin.gr
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A cannabinoid way to understanding brain complexity
The brain is the most complex and interconnected organ of the body. My laboratory uses the study of type-1 cannabinoid receptors (CB1) as a tool to try better understanding brain complexity. For instance, the impact of the balance between neuronal excitation and inhibition, of astrocyte activity, of sensory perception and, more recently, of mitochondrial and bioenergetic processes on brain functions and behavior were investigate through the CB1 receptors’ lens.
Biography
Dr. Giovanni Marsicano is a tenured researcher at Inserm. He leads the group “Endocannabinoids and Neuroadaptation” at the NeuroCentre Magendie, an INSERM and University of Bordeaux Research Center devoted to neuroscience. Dr. Marsicano is a Veterinary Medicine Doctor as formation. After his diploma, he worked on research related to Embryonic Stem Cells from farm animals and to xenotransplantation models in Italy for 4 years. He then moved to the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich for a PhD student position with Beat Lutz, where he initiated the work on the role of type-1 cannabinoid receptors (CB1) and of the endocannabinoid system (ECS) in brain physiology, which has been his main research interest since. The subject of his PhD thesis was the generation of conditional mutants for CB1 and anatomical and functional studies on the mechanisms of action of the ECS. After PhD graduation in 2001, he made two post-doctoral periods in Germany and moved to Bordeaux in 2006 (recruited as Inserm senior scientist in 2007) to lead his independent research group. He is member of the SfN, the French Society of Neuroscience, the International Cannabinoid Research Society (ICRS), and he has been recently elected at EMBO and at FRM (Fondation de la Recherche Medicale). He received, among others, the IACM Young Investigator Award (2007), the Bettencourt-Schuller Price (2008), the Grand Prix Robert Debré (2015), and the prestigious Grand Prix Lamonica for Neurobiology (2021).
Sex differences in the brain at the intersection of the nervous, immune and endocrine systems
Biography
Margaret (Peg) McCarthy received a PhD from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University, Newark NJ, completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in New York NY and was a National Research Council Fellow at NIH-NIAAA before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1993 in Baltimore Maryland, USA. She was a Professor in the Department of Physiology before becoming the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology in 2011. McCarthy has a long-standing interest in the cellular mechanisms establishing sex differences in the brain. She uses a combined behavioral and mechanistic approach in the laboratory rat to understand both normal brain development and how these processes might go selectively awry in males versus females. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has been cited close to 10,000 times. In addition to being Chair of the Department of Pharmacology, Margaret is the inaugural Director of the University of Maryland – Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery (UM-MIND). She is a Reviewing Editor for Journal of Neuroscience and a fellow with AAAS and ACNP, former President of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences and current President of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology.
How to make a Hippocampus
Biography:
Shubha Tole obtained her BSc in Life Sciences and Biochemistry from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai (1987). Her MSc and PhD are from Caltech, USA. She worked at the University of Chicago as a post-doctoral fellow, and joined the Tata Institute in Mumbai, India as a faculty member in 1999.
Tole is a recipient of the Infosys Science Foundation Award for Life sciences (2014); the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award (2010); the Research Award for Innovation in Neurosciences (RAIN) from the Society for Neuroscience (2008); the National Woman Bioscientist award from the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India (2008); the Swarnajayanti Fellowship awarded by the Department of Science in Technology, Govt. of India (2005); and the Wellcome Trust Senior International Fellowship (1999). She is a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Science, and the National Academy of Science. Internationally, she is an Associate member of EMBO and the current President of the International Society for Developmental Neuroscience (ISDN).
Tole served as Chair of the Women in Science panel and as a member of the panel on Scientific Values of the Indian Academy of Sciences from 2019-2022, and on the Board of Directors of the ALBA Network 2021-2024.
Tole is the newly elected President-elect of the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) https://ibro.org/ibro-elections-2024/
After a 1-year term as President-elect in 2025, she will serve as President for 3 years. She will be the first IBRO President from a developing country.
Tole believes that communicating science is as important as pursuing it, and actively engages in public outreach via workshops in schools and colleges, and writes blogs aimed at helping students and postdocs plan their careers. In 2022 she was recognized for her mentorship by being awarded the Bernice Grafstein Award for Oustanding Accomplishments in Mentoring by the Society for Neuroscience, USA.
The STole lab welcomes free and open discussion. We value collegiality, professionalism, passion, and work-life balance. Lab meetings include not only science but also science communication, discussions of experimental techniques and sometimes, dance, theater, language, and music; research papers as well as interesting articles/books/tweets/blogs on any topic of interest. Humor is to be found aplenty in our daily lives and memorialized in our “lab quotes.”
How dendrites empower biological and artificial brains
Panayiota Poirazi is a Research Director and head of the Dendrites Lab (www.dendrites.gr) at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH). She has a Bachelor in Mathematics from the University of Cyprus, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is interested in understanding how dendrites contribute to biological and artificial intelligence uses computational approaches, often in conjunction with experiments, to answer this question. Her work has significantly advanced our understanding of how single neurons compute, by revealing the power of dendrites in solving difficult problems. She received numerous awards for her academic achievements, including an Einstein Foundation fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, an ERC Starting Grant and an EMBO YIP award, among others. She is a member of EMBO, was the first Chair of the FENS-Kavli Network of excellence and is the Secretary General of FENS (Federation for European Neuroscience Societies).