Dr Teodora Georgescu and Isaac Tripp receive their prizes from Prof Greg Anderson.
The New Zealand Society of Endocrinology awarded its annual prizes for students and emerging researchers at Queenstown Research Week and this year both went to the Centre for Neuroendocrinology.
Dr Teodora Georgescu won the 2022 Emerging Researcher Award and gave her award lecture titled: “Preparing for motherhood: from maternal behaviours to temperature regulation.”
The talk covered her previous work with Prof Dave Grattan and Dr Rosie Brown on how the hormone prolactin safeguards the healthy development of offspring, e.g. by causing changes in the mother's brain which allow her to effectively defend her offspring from intruders. Teodora also presented her future more independent research plans to study the involvement of prolactin in body temperature regulation of the mother during pregnancy and lactation.
The NZSE Medi'Ray student speaker prize was heavily contested and 4 out of the 5 finalists were students from the Centre for Neuroendocrinology. In the end, MSc student Isaac Tripp from Karl Iremonger's group narrowly won the award with his presentation on the role of the stress hormone CRH in weighing up between the anxiety of exploring a novel potentially dangerous environment and the urge to feed when hungry.