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Headlines 5 Professor Denise Taylor Making sense of balance: Staying upright against all odds Professor Bronwen Connor Back to the future: The promise of cell reprogramming Wednesday 15 March 4.30-6pm, Auckland We have had a lot of interest in this event and unfortunately it has sold out! However it will bemade available on our website at neurological.org.nz/events Professor Denise Taylor will consider the important contribution our senses make to balance and consider the myriad of ways these systems work together to help us maintain our balance. Her talk will be followed by a presentation by Professor Bronwen Connor, who will discuss one of the greatest challenges in developing new drugs to treat neurological disorders – the lack of ability to study live brain cells. Professor Connor will discuss her work to overcome this by ‘reprogramming’ human skin cells into brain stem cells, and subsequently mature brain cells. Dr Denise Taylor is a Professor of Physiotherapy at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and Director of the Health and Rehabilitation Research Institute. Her interests are in rehabilitation and specifically in balance, bringing new technologies and treatments to people with neurological and vestibular disorders. Professor Bronwen Connor is a successful neuropharmacologist and in 2018 was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for contribution to the treatment of neurological disease. Her research has been supported by 15 Neurological Foundation grants. She is currently Head of the Neural Reprogramming and Repair Lab at the Centre for Brain Research, University of Auckland. Dr Josh McGeown Making an invisible injury visible: Using cutting-edge MRI to understand concussion Wednesday 22 March, 6-8pm, Online Concussion is an ‘invisible’ injury because there is no noticeable bruising or swelling, and standard medical imaging techniques do not show any abnormalities. In his talk, Dr Josh McGeown will outline how his personal experience of suffering concussion led him towards a career in research, and how his current work using cutting-edge MRI is making this invisible injury more visible. Dr Josh McGeown is a postdoctoral research fellow at Mātai Medical Research Institute in Tairāwhiti-Gisborne. His work into understanding how the biological consequences of concussion impact clinical outcomes is supported by a Neurological Foundation First Fellowship. Dr Lola Mugisho Eye spy: The role of inflammation in neurodegenerative disease Monday 27 March, 1.30-2.30pm Online During this talk, Dr Lola Mugisho will discuss how her team has discovered a new disease pathway through which inflammation mediates its detrimental effects in chronic neurodegenerative diseases affecting the eye and brain. She will also discuss exciting new therapeutic options that could slow down or halt progression of these diseases. Dr Lola Mugisho holds a Neurological Foundation First Fellowship and is Deputy Director of the Buchanan Ocular Therapeutics Unit at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses primarily on the role of the inflammasome pathway in chronic neurodegenerative diseases.