Even today there are many unknowns when it comes to brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, brain cancer, epilepsy and depression, and we still can’t fully comprehend these diseases that afflict so many in our society. The Brain Diseases Fund was set up to find answers to some of the most pressing questions in this area.
The Brain Diseases Fund promotes non-clinical basic research at the University of Zurich by supporting junior researchers. The UZH Foundation uses the funds to hand out annual prizes to young scientists for their outstanding contributions in the field of brain diseases. The UZH Award for Research in Brain Diseases was first awarded in 2006. The awarding of funds is overseen by an advisory board.
Much research is still needed on brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Are you a PhD candidate looking to boost your research on brain diseases? Apply for the Brain Diseases Award and present your findings to our prestigious panel of experts. The UZH Foundation awards yearly prizes (of CHF 10,000 each) for outstanding research among all submissions. Here you can find informations on the rules for applicants. Please submit your application in full as a PDF file by 30 April to Prof. Dr. Amedeo Caflisch.
Rules for Applicants Brain Diseases Award
The advisory board is made up of the following members:
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia. In AD, proteins called Aβ and tau self-aggregate into filamentous structures termed amyloid, which form pathological aggregates that disrupt normal functioning of neurons and contribute to their demise. My PhD project used cryogenic electron tomography (cryoET) to observe Aβ and tau within AD brains. Using cryoET, we identified novel components of Aβ aggregates, discovered differences in amyloid organisations, and visualised the structural fold of amyloid filaments within brain tissue for the first time. These results inform how amyloid aggregates within AD brains, increasing our understanding of neurodegenerative disease.
3D segmentation of a tau thread; gold arrowhead tau filments (Credits: Madeleine Gilbert)
Learning from rewards is critical to survival and can be altered in psychiatric diseases such as depression, addiction, and bipolar disorder. We know roughly how the brain learns about average reward, but little about whether and how it learns about reward distributions, which recent work in machine learning shows can unlock vast performance gains. In my PhD, I recorded from the brains of mice trained to associate odors with different reward distributions. Not only were probability distributions represented within the brain, but different cell types were preferentially dedicated to encoding the upper and lower tails of these distributions, and activating or inhibiting these cell types shifted the animals' behavior accordingly. Lastly, I synthesized these empirical findings into a new computational model that explains how such learning may be implemented at the biological level, thus providing a novel target for therapeutic interventions.
(a) Mice were trained to associate six random, neutral odors with water rewards. (b) The three probability distributions used, each paired with two unique odors. (c) Two example neurons, one of which fired more to Variable odors (left) and the other which fired more to Fixed odors (right). (d) Visualization of all neurons' activity in an example session, showing that odors associated with the same exact probability distribution (e.g., light and dark red) are represented more similarly than ones associated with the same mean but different variance (e.g, dark red and blue) (Credits: Adam Lowet)
Looking at the funds awarded to date, one pleasing feature can be noted: More than 20 of the 30 prizes for groundbreaking results in brain research have been awarded to female doctoral students. The Brain Diseases Award therefore not only recognizes great innovative potential, it also promotes women in science.
