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Director's view: July 2018

Message from the Director and Manager

Thankyou
Welcome to the first edition of the Institute’s termly newsletter, which is an update and highlights some of the many excellent activities at the Institute.

First, we want to sincerely thank you for all your hard work which is critical in enabling the Institute to be highly successful across its full range of activities including education, basic science and translational science.

Our efforts remain clearly focused on understanding fundamental biology and disease mechanisms and ultimately translating this into patient benefit; alongside education and training the next generation. We continue to work very closely with our key partners including the National Hospital (UCLH), Faculty and UCLP.
 
There have been many significant Institute successes some attracting major media attention: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ion/news  
Athena Swan
We have submitted our application for renewal of our Athena Swan Silver award and I would like to thank all that have contributed to the application, especially our Athena Swan leads, Drs Helene Plun-Favreau and Selina Wray, and our Athena Swan team.

Departmental reconfiguration
We continue to implement the recommendations from our external scientific review held in January 2017, and I am very pleased to announce that we have completed the second phase of our carefully planned ION departmental re-organisation.
 
The first phase included the appointment of new Heads of Research department for the Department of Neurodegenerative Disease, Professors Sarah Tabrizi and Nick Fox. The Department of Neurodegenerative Disease is closely aligned with the UK DRI Hub and Nick Fox is also acting as the interim associate director of the DRI Hub at UCL. New scientific staff are being recruited to DRI Hub and so far this includes Professors Hugh Perry and Carlo Sala Frigerio and Dr Michael Sheridan. The MRC Prion Unit has now relocated to its newly refurbished Courtauld Building and is established as a new Institute.
 
The second phase of reconfiguration has seen the scientific and strategic re-alignment of certain activities to maximise scientific synergies creating the Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences with the appointment of Professor Tony Schapira as its Head and Professor Tom Warner as Deputy Head, and the Department of Neuromuscular Diseases, incorporating the MRC Centre and the ALS Centre with Professor Linda Greensmith as its Head. We thank all our colleagues who have enabled this implementation.

New Institute of Neurology Building
The new building at the EDH site is progressing well, with RIBA stage 2 completed. The ION-DRI programme will develop a new dual hub that will be one of the leading translational neuroscience centres in the world. As the programme progresses we will develop our newly dedicated intranet pages, to keep you informed: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ion/intranet/ion-dri

New Clinical Director of the National Hospital, Queen Square
Welcome and congratulations to Dr Chris Turner on his appointment as the new Clinical Director of the Queen Square Division of UCLH. Sincere thanks to Professor John Duncan for all his close work with IoN over the last 6 years.

Rebranding to "UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology"
In June UCL Council approved the recommendation made by the Institute executive, following the PI consultations in 2017, to re-brand the Institute to the "UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology"

The re-branding will be implemented in the new academic year.  Further guidance on branding, stationery templates, email signatures and our logo will be circulated.

Further updates and information are provided in the sections below.
 
We can all be very proud of what you and your  teams continue to achieve. We hope you have an enjoyable summer break!
 
Michael & Helene

Focus - Working at the Institute

  • Staff survey Thank you to everyone who completed the 2017 staff survey. We have put together an action plan for improvements based on your feedback.
  • Athena SWAN  We recently submitted our application for renewal of our Athena Swan Silver award. Please see our Athena SWAN action plan. 
  • Wellbeing We are delighted to announce two new UCL well-being champions for IoN : Elizabeth Halton and Jacky Bauer. Please see the Wellbeing pages on the IoN intranet for links to useful resources
  • Working at the Institute webpages have recently been launched including information on how the IoN supports the Dignity at Work policy.
  • Room Bookings please see the intranet for the latest information and contacts, including the procedures following the Prion Unit relocation.
Remember the online IoN handbook provides further information on everything you need to know about working at the Institute: feedback is always welcome!
 

 Newly awarded grants over £500k

British Heart Foundation

  • Professor David Werring (Brain Repair & Rehabilitation Department) had been awarded £2,045,998 over 60 months from 1 April 2018 for a project entitled “OPTIMAS:  OPtimal TIMing of Anticoagulation after AF-associated acute ischaemic Stroke: a randomised controlled trial”.


Medical Research Council 

  • Dr Christian Lambert (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging) has been awarded £1,201,513 from 14 February 2018 for 48 months for a project entitled ‘Defining and predicting variability in early Parkinson’s disease using quantitative MRI’.
  • Professor Linda Greensmith (Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience & Movement Disorders) and Dr Rickie Patani (Department of Molecular Neuroscience) have been awarded £565,584 over 36 months from 1st May 2018 for a project on ‘Development of a Translational Strategy to Overcome Muscle Paralysis Using Stem Cell Derived Neural Grafts and Optogenetics’.
  • Professor Dimitri Kullmann (Department of Clinical & Experimental Epilepsy) has been awarded £815,581 over 48 months from 1st April 2018 for a project on ‘Engineered Potassium Channel Gene Therapy for Epilepsy’ (Principal Investigator:  Professor Stephanie Schorge (School of Pharmacy, UCL).
  • Dr Robert Pitceathly, MRC Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases, MRC Clinician Scientist fellowship award £1.1m over 48 months on "The role of cardiolipin metabolism in mitochondrial DNA replication and mitochondrial biogenesis"
  • Professors Michael Hanna, Mary Reilly and Henry Houlden (MRC Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases). MRC Strategic award to establish an International Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases. £3.66m from October 2018-2023.

NIHR

  • Professor Anette Schrag (Department of Clinical Neuroscience) has been awarded £946,850 over 47 months from 1 May 2018 for a research project entitled ‘Antidepressants Trial in Parkinson’s Disease (ADepT-PD)’.


UK DRI Ltd

  • Professor Sarah Tabrizi (Department of Neurodegenerative Disease) and Professor Gillian Bates (Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience & Movement Disorders) awarded a grant of £1,500,000 as the DRI Core Award to the Hub at UCL from 1st April 2018 for 60 months.

 
Wellcome Trust

  • Principal Research Fellowship of Professor Eleanor Maguire (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging) is renewed with the award of a grant of £2,359,757 from 1st October 2018 for 60 months to carry out research on ‘Characterising the neural mechanisms of human memory at high resolution’ .
  • Dr Tobias Hauser (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging) awarded Wellcome Henry Dale fellowship (amount tbc) for a project on “Mapping the neurocomputational landscape of obsessive-compulsive disorder”



Funding opportunities

Congratulations!

We’re pleased to announce the following recent prizes and awards:

Professor John Hardy and Professor Bart De Strooper accepted the 2018 Brain Prize 
Six UCL scientists elected Fellows of the Royal Society  including Professor Kullmann
Professor Eleanor Maguire becomes Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy
Dr Selina Wray wins David Hague Early Career Investigator of the Year at the Alzheimer’s Research UK Conference 2018 
Professor Barkhof awarded 2018 John Dystel Prize
Dr Robb Rutledge receives 2018 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award
Professor Cathy Price awarded scientific "heirloom" in recognition of her achievements in the field of brain imaging
Dr Rafaele Ferrari & Dr Phil Weston win runner up prizes in the Dementia Research Leaders awards

Professor Olga Ciccarelli has been awarded an NIHR professorship.
Queen Square Symposium 2018 : award-winning posters
UCL Brain Sciences Communications Excellence Awards 2018: IoN Education team win best comms targeted at students

Teaching Awards 2018 The Education Team would like to highlight the following teaching awards.
Senior Academic, Research and Teaching Fellow promotions announced for 2017-18

Professor John Hardy and Professor Bart De Strooper receiving the 2018 Brain Prize, along with fellow winners Michel Goedert and Christian Haass, presented by Crown Prince of Denmark on May 9th. (Photo by Lars Just.)
 See more IoN news 

New Starters     
Welcome to the following staff who joined IoN in the past 3 months:

Professor Hugh Perry, Professor Carlo Sala Frigerio, Dr Michael Sheridan, Ms Sarah Buck,  Dr Lucrezia Ilvento,  Dr Diego Perez Rodriguez,  Mr Syed Murshed,  Dr Jochen Michely,  Dr Nikolaos Zafeiropoulos,  Dr Teisha Bradshaw, Miss Kylie Pan,  Dr Nozie Aghaizu,  Mr Stephane Bugeon,  Ms Jenny Lee, Miss Aneesa Ali,  Dr Balapuwaduge Mendis,  Miss Anne-Marie Harriot,  Dr Subhojit Chakraborty,  Dr Joao Aguiar Martins Neto, Miss Aleksandra Pietrusz, Dr Dimitrios Nikoloutsopoulos, Miss Rebecca Oyekan, Mr Baris Kanber, Ms Alexandra Rene, Dr Nikhil Sharma, Dr Guillaume Flandin, Dr Sandra Fienko, Miss Charlotte Spicer, Dr Dimitrios Nikoloutsopoulos, Dr Salman Haider, Dr Boris Pantic, Dr Steve Fleming, Miss Toyah Perkins, Mr Baris Kanber, Miss Taniesha Jackson-Morgan,  Ms Tracey Stead, Mr Daniel Yaseen Gharai, Ms Sally Haddow Pearl, Miss Miriam Pollard
 
 Please see IoN Vacancies for opportunities at IoN

Upcoming IoN events

     
Director's summer drinks 2018

Thursday 26th July, from 5.30pm
Courtyard, Mary Ward House Conference and Events Centre, Tavistock Place
RSVP by 18th July:
s.jayasuriya@ucl.ac.uk

Annual Address 2018
Professor Fiona Watt, Executive Chair, Medical Research Council, has accepted the invitation to give the Annual Address on 29th October 2018, 5.30pm.

 See more IoN events
Email to give your feedback on IoN newsletter
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