Meet our Keynote and Plenary speakers
Keynote speaker
Saturday 7 October, 15.15-16.15
Sheena Josselyn, Canada
KL01 — Making and breaking memories
Sheena Josselyn is a senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and a professor in the departments of psychology and physiology at the University of Toronto in Canada. She holds a Canada Research Chair in brain mechanisms underlying memory, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Her undergraduate degrees in psychology and life sciences and a Masters degree in clinical psychology were granted by Queen’s University in Kingston (Canada). Sheena received a PhD in neuroscience/psychology from the University of Toronto with Dr. Franco Vaccarino as her supervisor. She conducted post-doctoral work with Dr. Mike Davis (Yale University) and Dr. Alcino Silva (UCLA).
She received numerous awards, including the Innovations in Psychopharmacology Award from the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CCNP), the Effron Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and the Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences.
Sheena is interested in understanding how the brain encodes, stores and uses information. Her primary model organism is mice. However, several human disorders (ranging from autism spectrum disorder to Alzheimer’s disease) may stem from disrupted information processing. Therefore, this basic knowledge in mice is not only critical for understanding normal brain function, but also vital for the development of new treatment strategies for these disorders.
She recently spoke about her work to ECNP press officer, Tom Parkhill.
Read the interview
Plenary Speakers
We will again have six Plenary Lectures as part of the scientific programme. Our confirmed speakers are:
Sunday 8 October, 10.15-11.00
Oscar Marín, United Kingdom
PL01 — ECNP Neuropsychopharmacology Award Lecture — Cortical interneurons in health and disease
Oscar Marín, United Kingdom, is the recipient of the 2023 ECNP Neuropsychopharmacology Award, in recognition of his achievements in advancing our understanding of the development of the cerebral cortex and the aetiology of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Read the press release
The ECNP Neuropsychopharmacology Award recognises exceptional research achievements in applied and translational neuroscience.
The award is granted each year, alternating between pre-clinical and clinical research. The 2023 award is in pre-clinical research.
Sunday 8 October, 16.35-17.20
Deanna Barch, USA
PL02 — Early emergence of mental illness: from brain imaging to emotion regulation
Deanna Barch is a clinical scientist whose research focuses on understanding normative patterns cognitive function and brain connectivity, as well as the mechanisms that lead to the challenges in behaviour and cognition seen in illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression. Her research uses psychological, neuroimaging and computational approaches.
She is the vice dean of research in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, couch professor of psychiatry and a professor of radiology. Deanna is Deputy Editor at Biological Psychiatry and Editor-in-Chief of Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science. She is also the president of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and she is on the scientific boards of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the One Mind Foundation, and the Stanley Foundation. She was on the executive committee of the Association for Psychological Science and the Scientific Council of the National Institute of Mental Health.
Deanna is a fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, a member of the Society for Experimental Psychology, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
She recently spoke about her work to ECNP press officer, Tom Parkhill.
Read the interview
Monday 9 October, 10.15-11.00
John Cryan, Ireland
PL03 — Gut feelings – The microbiota-gut-brain axis as a key regulator of brain and behaviour across the lifespan
Due the current situation in Israel, the Plenary Lecture PL03 ‘The neuro-immune axis: how the brain influences immunity’ by Asya Rolls, Israel, has had to be cancelled.
John Cryan (Chair of the Scientific Programme Committee 35th, 36th and 37th ECNP congress) is Professor & Chair, Dept. of Anatomy & Neuroscience, University College Cork. He is also a Principal Investigator in the APC Microbiome Institute. He received a B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He was a visiting fellow at the Dept Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Australia, which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. He spent four years at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel Switzerland, as a LabHead, Behavioural Pharmacology prior to joining UCC in 2005. Prof. Cryan's current research is focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut & microbiome and how it applies to stress, psychiatric and immune-related disorders at key time-windows across the lifespan. Prof. Cryan has published over 650 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has a H-index of 150 (Google Scholar). He is a Senior Editor of Neuropharmacology and of Nutritional Neuroscience. He is on the editorial board of a further 15 journals. He has edited three books and is co-author of the bestselling "The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection" (National Geographic Press, 2017). He has received numerous awards including UCC Researcher of the Year in 2012, the University of Utrecht Award for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research in 2013, UCC Research Communicator of the Year 2017, and being named on the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher list in 2014 and Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher list in 2017, 2018 & 2019. He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2017. He also received a Research Mentor Award from the American Gastroenterology Association and the Tom Connor Distinguished Scientist Award from Neuroscience Ireland in 2017 and was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium in 2018. He was a TEDMED speaker in Washington in 2014 and is Past-President of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society. Prof. Cryan's current research interests include the neurobiological basis of stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders including depression, anxiety and drug dependence. Moreover, his group is also focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut & microbiome and how it applies to stress and immune-related disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome and obesity and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. He is also interested in applying novel approaches to facilitate drug/siRNA delivery to the brain in vivo.
Monday 9 October, 16.35-17.20
Sergiu Pasca, USA
PL04 — From stem cells to assembloids and toward buildings human circuits in living systems to study disease
Sergiu Pasca, MD is a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University and the Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Founding Director of Stanford Brain Organogenesis. He is a NYSCF Robertson Investigator, a CZI Ben Barres Investigator and a Chan Zuckerberg BioHub Investigator.
Pasca is interested in understanding the rules governing human brain assembly and the mechanisms of disease. His laboratory at Stanford introduced instructive signals for reproducibly deriving self-organising neural region-specific organoids and pioneered a modular platform known as assembloids to study migration and neural circuit formation. Pasca systematically applied these cellular models to gain insights into human physiology, evolution and disease, and extensively supported researchers around the world in implementing these techniques.
Pasca was named a Visionary in Medicine and Science by the New York Times, was featured as a physician-scientist by Nature Medicine, and he was a TED 2022 Speaker.
He is the recipient of the 2018 Vilcek Award for Creative Biomedical Promise, the National Institute of Mental Health BRAINS Award (2015), the MQ Award for Transforming Mental Health (2014), the A.E. Bennett Award in Biological Psychiatry (2018), the Folch-Pi Neurochemistry Award (2017), the Günter Blobel Award for Cell Biology (2018), the Daniel E. Efron Award in Neuropsychopharmacology (2018), a Breakthrough in Life Sciences Prize (2020) from Falling Walls, the International Basic Science Schizophrenia Prize (2021), the Joseph Altman Award in Developmental Neuroscience (2021), the Theodore Reich Award (2021), the Judson Daland Prize from the American Philosophical Society (2021) and the 13th IBRO-Kemali Neuroscience Award (2022).
Tuesday 10 October, 10.05-10.50
Peter Goadsby, United Kingdom
PL05 – Brain Prize Lecture – Understanding migraine to develop novel therapeutics: a bench to bedside journey
Peter Goadsby FRS is director, NIHR King’s Clinical Research Facility, professor of neurology, King’s College London, an honorary consultant neurologist at King’s College Hospital and the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond St, London, United Kingdom; and a National Institute for Health and Social Care Research senior investigator. He is professor emeritus of neurology, University of California, Los Angeles. His major research interests are in the basic mechanisms of primary headache disorders, such as migraine and cluster headache, in both experimental and clinical settings, and translating these insights into better management.
The world’s largest brain research prize is awarded annually by the Lundbeck Foundation. Each year, they award 10 million DKK (approx. 1,3 million EUR) to one or more neuroscientists who have made a ground-breaking impact on brain research. The Brain Prize was first awarded in 2011 and has so far honoured 38 scientists from 8 different countries. More info
Tuesday 10 October, 14.00-14.45
Kafui Dzirasa, USA
PL06 — Transforming mental illness through technology
Kafui Dzirasa completed a PhD in neurobiology at Duke University. His research interests focus on understanding how changes in the brain produce neurological and mental illness. Kafui obtained an MD from the Duke University School of Medicine in 2009, and he completed residency training in general psychiatry in 2016.
In 2016, Kafui was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the nation’s highest award for scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. In 2017, he was recognized as 40 under 40 in Health by the National Minority Quality Forum. He was induced into the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2019, and the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.
Kafui has served as an associate scientific advisor for the journal Science Translational Medicine, a member of the congress-mandated Next Generation Research Initiative, the Editorial Advisory Board for TEDMED, and on the NIH Director’s guiding committee for the BRAIN Initiative. Kafui is an associate professor at Duke University with appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, Neurobiology, and Biomedical Engineering.
