The CNE had a busy week with 3 days of lectures, talks and posters. The set of events got kicked off with the 2018 CNE Lecture given by Dr. Paolo Giacobini from INSERM in Lille, France who paid Dunedin a short but very enjoyable and intensive visit to give his lecture entitled “Extra-gonadal effects of Anti-Müllerian Hormone: wiring the brain to reproductive function and dysfunction”.
This was immediately followed by the annual competition for the CNE PhD Prize which this year saw 4 contestants of very high calibre. In the end Bradley Jamieson won by unanimous vote with his talk “Investigating the Projections of Suprachiasmatic Vasopressin Neurons to Preoptic Kisspeptin Neurons”.
The following 2 days were dominated by the Women's Wellbeing Symposium which was organized by 5 CNE postdocs and students (Dr Teodora Georgescu, Dr Kristina Smiley, Dr Eulalia Coutinho, Dr Joe Yip, India Sawyer) to raise awareness for and foster more research focussed on females/women in the medical sciences. The symposium was both very diverse and well-attended and offered prizes for both student and postdoctoral researcher presentations. Again, Bradley Jamieson convinced the judges – this time with a poster presentation - and was closely followed by Eleni Hackwell from the Grattan Lab. The postdoctoral poster presentation category was also won by a CNE researcher. Dr Holly Phillipps from the Grattan lab took home the prize with her poster “Insulin-like Growth Factor 2, a prolactin-responsive gene in the adult mouse choroid plexus”.