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4 Headlines Brain Awareness Month 2022 Due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19, this year we’re going digital with Brain Awareness Month. Brain Awareness Month is all about showcasing the incredible organ that is our brain. We’ll be hosting a series of mind-blowing digital talks, showcasing our researchers that you, our supporters, have helped and continue to help fund. By hosting these events online via Zoom, this means we can ensure the safety of our staff, researchers, and you, our supporters. It also enables us to share the work of our researchers with supporters across the country, and even internationally. We hope you will join us in celebrating Brain Awareness Month, in learning about the importance of neurological research and the wonders of the human brain. Karl Iremonger Building blocks of the brain: Insights into how the brain functions Monday 7 March, 10am Our brains control everything about us – our movements, our emotions, and our memories. These complex behaviours are generated by the coordinated action of billions of individual brain cells called neurons. Each neuron functions like a tiny computer relaying information from one part of the brain to another. When these neurons fail to function properly, this results in devastating neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia, or depression. Because we don’t know enough about how brain cells work, when they malfunction, the clinical treatments are often poor or ineffective. Dr Iremonger will discuss research that is shedding new light on how healthy brain cells function. This basic biomedical research is leading to a more complete understanding of how the brain works and in turn the development of new drug targets and treatments for neurological disorders. Dr Karl Iremonger completed an undergraduate degree in Physical Education and Physiology at the University of Otago. He then moved to Calgary, Canada where he completed a MSc and a PhD in Neuroscience. In 2010, he returned to the University of Otago to work on a project studying hypothalamic neurons which control fertility. In 2014, Karl established his own laboratory investigating neural circuits in the brain that control stress responses. Elizabeth Cooper Developing new treatments for glioblastoma Thursday 17 March 6.30pm During this talk, Elizabeth will discuss her research into better understanding and treating the aggressive brain cancer known as glioblastoma. Elizabeth has the unique privilege of being able to use cells grown from brain tumours donated by patients through the Hugh Green Biobank. Working with medicinal chemists at the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre, her work uses fluorescent dyes combined with existing targeted chemotherapies to better understand and hopefully improve their blood-brain barrier uptake and tumour specificity, two key issues that challenge the use of these drugs for brain tumours. Elizabeth Cooper is a PhD student at the Centre for Brain Research at the University of Auckland and is funded by a Neurological Foundation Gillespie Scholarship for her research into the primary brain tumour, glioblastoma. Her research focusses on the development of new treatments for glioblastoma, which despite a rigorous treatment regimen, has a devastating survival time of only 12 to 15 months. Lynette Sadleir Epilepsy and the brain Tuesday 22 March, 1pm In her clinical role as a paediatric epileptologist, Professor Sadleir diagnoses and manages children with epilepsy. In this talk, Dr Sadleir will discuss how she is helping to identify and refine emerging genetic epilepsy syndromes, and the genetic abnormalities that cause them. The identification of new epilepsy syndromes and genes leads to a deeper understanding of epilepsy with implications for diagnosis, prognosis, and development of new treatments. Professor Sadleir has been funded by the Neurological Foundation to research epilepsy in Māori, and to compare