We congratulate assistant professor Melanie Ganz for being elected as member of the BIDS Steering Group. The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a standard specifying the description of neuroimaging data in a filesystem hierarchy and of the metadata associated with the imaging data. Membership on the BIDS Steering Group is through elections by BIDS Contributors, and BIDS Steering Group terms are 3 years. The goal of BIDS is to make neuroimaging data more accessible, shareable, and usable by researchers. To achieve this goal, BIDS seeks to develop a simple and intuitive way to organize and describe neuroimaging and associated data. BIDS has three foundational principles:
To minimize complexity and facilitate adoption, reuse existing methods and technologies whenever possible.
Tackle 80% of the most commonly used neuroimaging data, derivatives, and models (inspired by the pareto principle).
Adoption by the global neuroimaging community and their input during the creation of the specification is critical for the success of the project.
Congratulations to Louise Møller Jørgensen who has been appointed Clinical Associate Professor withfunction as innovation ambassador at Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Copenhagen. Louise will begin in this new function November 1 and will be serving in SUND’s Innovation working group, which aim to advance innovations and entrepreneurship set off in the clinics.
Congratulations to Mikael Palner for receiving 50,000 DKK for the project "Parkinson’s Disease-like pig model for alpha-synuclein PET tracer development".
Congratulations to NRU post doc Dea Siggaard Stenbæk for receiving an International Postdoc grant worth 1.575.000 DKK from Independent Research Fund Denmark for the project entitled 'Brain dynamics of psychedelic serotonin 2A stimulation and music'.
Project period: 01-01-2020 to 31-12-2021.
Brief scentific summary of project: Serotonin 2A receptor stimulation with the psychedelic compound psilocybin is emerging as a promising treatment for affective disorders, which includes the use of music as support. Music evokes a wide range of emotions and can change the way we think and feel about ourselves. However, a better understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms by which music interplay with psychoactive effects of psilocybin is needed to inform us about its clinical utility. I propose to evaluate changes in brain connectivity in response to psilocybin and music measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging, and to correlate such changes with cerebral serotonin 2A receptor binding measured with positron emission tomography. International partners are leading world experts from the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London where I plan to stay for 12 months. Results from the study will contribute significantly to our understanding of the role played by music in psilocybin-assisted therapy.
Congratulations to PhD student Agata Sainz for receiving a travel grant from the Lundbeck Foundation for her research stay at North Carolina State University, Raleigh.
Congratulations to Junior Group Leader Dea Stenbæk who will begin a 5-year part-time employment as Research Associate Professor at Institute of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, September 15. A core task will be to bridge between the Neurobiology Research Unit and Institute of Psychology through supervision and teaching of PhD and master's students.
NRU PhD student Giske Opheim and NRU senior researcher Lars Pinborg perform cutting-edge epilepsy research with 7T MR, aiming at improving future imaging-based treatment of epilepsy.
Read more (in Danish) about their research in an article published in the online magazine IndenRigs.
Congratulations to Lene, Annette and Martin N, all having received travel grants from the Lundbeck Foundation; Lene and Annette for their participation at the recent Brain/BrainPET meeting in Yokohama and Martin N who will attend the MICCAI meeting in Hong Kong this October.
