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To view all of the 2020 entries, please visit flashesofbrilliance.co.nz . Headlines 9 The brain and art collided this past November when the Neurological Foundation held its inaugural photo competition called, Flashes of Brilliance. Scientists and clinicians throughout New Zealand entered the best photo of their research in a month-long competition where the public and a set of judges voted for the top photos to win three prizes. Flashes of Brilliance celebrates everything beautiful and artistic about research and the brain, and the winners did not disappoint. First Place And in first place we have Dr Helen Murray from the University of Auckland with “Party Popper”. This image shows the complex network of connections within the human olfactory bulb - the brain area responsible for our sense of smell. Helen was ecstatic to have learnt her image Party Popper won the Flashes of Brilliance competition! When asked why she entered the photo she mentioned that the photo itself represents a larger breakthrough – the technique used to obtain the photo. “This image shows the complexity of connections between cells in the olfactory bulb, but the most exciting part of this image for me is the ground-breaking technique that we used to create it. I used a tissue labelling technique that I was introduced to during my time at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA. This method is called multiplex immunohistochemistry and it allows us to label up to 100 different protein markers that we might be interested in, so we can look at many different components of the tissue all at once. This novel approach provides over 20x more information from a single piece of tissue than traditional methods that label up to 5 different protein markers at a time.” Dr Helen Murray is a post-doctoral research fellow funded by the Health Education Trust and Brain Research New Zealand. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Auckland with Professor Maurice Curtis and her thesis investigating how plasticity is altered in Alzheimer’s disease was nominated as one of the top 20 for the University of Auckland Best Doctoral Thesis award in 2017. Helen’s expertise studying the human olfactory system recently led to a collaborative project with the National Institutes of Health to study the neurological effects of COVID-19. This study found there were microvascular changes in the brains of patients with COVID-19 and was published in the world’s most prestigious medical journal – the New England Journal of Medicine. Helen will be one of our Brain Awareness Month speakers in March this year if you would like to learn more about the research behind this winning image!