Speakers

Prof. Tara Spires-Jones

Tara Spires-Jones obtained her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford. Prior to moving to Scotland in 2013, she ran a group studying Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis with an emphasis on synaptic pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School, where she was an instructor from 2006-2011 and Assistant Professor from 2011-2013. Currently, she is a Professor of Neurodegeneration at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the mechanisms and reversibility of synapse degeneration in Alzheimer’s disease, other degenerative brain diseases, and ageing. Her work has shown that both of the proteins involved in the neuropathological lesions in Alzheimer’s disease (amyloid beta and tau) contribute to synapse degeneration, and further that reducing the levels of these proteins prevents degeneration and improves memory in disease models.

Prof. Matteo Carandini

Matteo Carandini received a Laurea in Mathematics from the Universita` di Roma in 1990 and obtained his PhD in Neural Science from New York University in 1996. After postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University and New York University, he established a laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1998. In 2002, he moved the laboratory to the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco and finally to UCL in 2007. Prof. Carandini runs a joint research group with Prof. Kenneth Harris, the Cortical Processing Laboratory at UCL. His work aims to understand how the brain processes sensory signals and integrates them with internal signals to guide decision and action. The goal of his research is to understand these processes at the level of large populations of individual neurons. Therefore, the laboratory investigates these questions with computational analysis and advanced experimental techniques, such as Neuropixels probe recordings.

Coding Club & Anna Chirumbolo

We are an enthusiastic group of ecology and environmental science students and researchers from the University of Edinburgh. We want to replace statistics anxiety and code fear with inspiration and motivation to learn. We believe that coding can be really fun and also understand the importance of quantitative skills for professional development.

Over the last four years we have been writing tutorials as well as organising in-person workshops. All of our materials are free for people to use and adapt - you can find more information on organising your own workshops or using Coding Club tutorials in your teaching here.

Coding Club is for everyone, regardless of their career stage or current level of knowledge. Coding Club is a place that brings people together, regardless of their gender or background. We all have the right to learn, and we believe learning is more fun and efficient when we help each other along the way.

Anna, leading the Rmarkdown workshop, did her BSc in Ecological and Environmental Sciences at Edinburgh where she developed a strong interest for data science and applications with remote sensing for monitoring long-term change in plant diversity. Her dissertation assessed the spatial consistency between two different data sets (one from satellite data and one from ground-based collections) on functional leaf trait distribution across the world’s biomes. Coding Club helped deepen her knowledge of coding and statistics and she is now sharing her knowledge and skills as a tutor and writing new tutorials for our website.

Dr Flavia H Santos

Dr Flavia H. Santos, UCD Ad Astra Fellow and Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is a cognitive neuroscientist focused on numerical cognition development and factors that affect its functioning such as math's anxiety. Dr Santos has a strong interest in how Music Science interact with emotion and cognition. For instance, she has carried out studies on interventions to stimulate and remediate mathematical performance using musical training and computerised tasks.

Dr Santos is a member of the UCD Childhood and Human Development Research Centre and leads the Music and Math Cognition Group. International affiliations: FENS, ALBA network, POWER and BlackInNeuro.

Dr Rebecca Northeast

Nadia Soliman

With a BSc (Hons) Pharmacology from the University of Liverpool, Nadia has returned to academia having served in both the regular and reserve of the British Army for over ten years. Specialising in explosive threat mitigation her service has taken her around the world, and she continues to deliver strategy, risk, and performance management services. Since returning to academia, she has gained an MSc in Drug Discovery Skills and MRes in Cellular and Molecular Biosciences and is in her final year of a PhD at Imperial College London. Her PhD is focused on developing automation technologies to improve the feasibility, efficiency and accuracy of preclinical systematic reviews while addressing neurobiological questions of interest. Her work will provide empirical evidence to improve the field of pain animal research, the use of machine assisted technology and how to employ a crowd of scientists from around the world to ensure that research conduct is rigorous, interpretable, open, and transparent. She has an interest in sharing her military experiences and knowledge of leadership development to engender a more positive research culture.

Julia Deathridge

Julia Deathridge has been an Assistant Features Editor at the open life sciences journal eLife since 2019. From covering research culture issues to writing and editing articles that highlight the latest research published in the journal, her job focuses on creating engaging content for eLife’s magazine section. Julia decided to make the jump from academia to science communication after a three-month

internship at the British Society of Immunology during her PhD in Cell Biology at University College London, an experience that helped her realise she liked writing about science more than working at the bench.