DPhil student Cristiana Tisca (2018) is based at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging within the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, and had previously been selected to represent the University of Oxford at the preliminary stage of the summit organised in 2021, alongside representatives from eight different leading European universities. The final round was held at the Neurotech Summit on 31st January 2022 where 15 online talks were presented. Each took the audience on exciting excursions into different destinations of neuroscience research such as Alzheimer’s disease, pain, facial recognition, neuroinflammation, and human cortical development. Candidates was scored for Presentation, Visualisation, Creativity and Innovation.
Cristiana’s DPhil project, with Prof Karla Miller and Dr Aurea Martins-Bach, delves deeper into findings from the world’s largest human neuroimaging dataset, the UK Biobank, which established links between genetic modifications and brain structure. In doing so, she images novel mouse models using both magnetic resonance neuroimaging and microscopy, seeking to understand the biological cause of these links. Ultimately, she aims to make a contribution towards our understanding of the genetic basis of brain structure and function across species.
