Frontiers in Neuroscience Seminar Series

• 29 September, 16:00, Segerfalk lecture hall, BMC, A10
  Professor Masud Husain, University of Oxford, UK

"When the spark goes out: The neurology of apathy and motivation"

Biosketch:
Masud Husain is Professor of Neurology & Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford. He works across departments of neuroscience, brain imaging and experimental psychology to understand cognitive functions in health and disease.

Masud studied Medicine at Oxford and was a Harkness Fellow at MIT, before holding positions at Imperial College and becoming Professor of Neurology at UCL (University College London) and the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, London.

At Oxford, he leads a research group which focuses on understanding memory and motivation in healthy individuals and people with disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, Parkinson’s disease and stroke. Masud holds a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship and leads the Neurological Conditions theme of the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre. He is Editor-in-Chief of Brain.

• 19 October, 16:00, online via Zoom (send an e-mail to diana [dot] jerman [at] med [dot] lu [dot] se for link) 
  Professor Elly Hol, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

"Neural progenitors in the subventricular zone of Parkinson patients"

The lecture will address the following topics:

• A splice-variant of GFAP, GFAPdelta, is a marker for human neural progenitors in the human developing and adult subventricular zone.
• Neural stem cells from elderly individuals and Parkinson patients form neurospheres and can be differentiated into neurons and glia in vitro.
• Ventricular cerebrospinal fluid increases neural progenitor proliferation and continues to stimulate neural progenitors throughout aging.
• Parkinson neural progenitors show significant changes at both transcriptome and proteome compared to neurological controls.
• Our transcriptomic and proteomic data suggest that the progenitors transit into a primed-quiescent state, that is in an "alert" non-proliferative phase in Parkinson.
• Single cell profiling of adult human neural progenitors identifies SFRP1 as a target to re-activate progenitors