In collaboration with the UCL Surgery and Interventional Science Society the Imperial Neurotech Society hosted our first ever student-led Neurotechnology symposium over the weekend. With 𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐍 speakers from top research labs and leading Neurotech companies, we hosted an all-day, catered symposium, in the 𝐛𝐢𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐧!
What began as an idea formed by Dameer Ahmed and Karim Yoosoofsah while out at dinner, grew due to the incredible outreach work of Jayla Kwok and Armand Darius Guerret-Shimi. Together the team amassed speakers covering all ranges of Neurotech topics, from Implanted Nerve Stimulators to Neural Biomarker Detection, from Brain Simulation to Brain Stimulation.
We are incredibly indebted to our speakers who gave up their time to provide insight to the questions they find most fascinating. As a very quick summary, here are 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 of the highlights:
• Prof. Clare Elwell on propelling neuroimaging into the global health arena, while also being mindful of neuroethics.
• Dr Parastoo HASHEMI on identifying a neural biomarker of depression and validating this through synaptic activity models.
• Dr Sadra Sadeh on integrating self-attention mechanisms from LLMs into variational autoencoders in order to model the brain’s plasticity through Hebbian Learning.
• Dr Romeo RACZ on juxtacellular (alongside cells) ultra-low impedance electrodes (jULIEs) for recording and stimulating with minimal brain tissue damage.
• Prof. Tom Carlson, Dr Jumpei Kashiwakura, Dr Dr Shama Rahman, and Mike Karim on scientists' need to remain aware of the political and social climate while maintaining control over future uses of emerging technologies.
• Dr Paul Bentley giving advice for identifying, developing, and scaling Neurotech solutions to real-world problems.
• Edvards Rutkovskis on developing invasive wirelessly powered implants for vagus nerve cuff-electrodes.
• Prof. Ilias Tachtsidis on correlating mitochondrial activity in the brain with functional fNIRS data.
In addition to this, we ran our 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 alongside the event. The competition was tight, and we are incredibly happy to announce our winners:
1st Prize: Alima N. - “Revolutionising Epilepsy Care with Shape-Changing Neural Interfaces”
2nd Prize: Oliver Downes (Loll) - “A Neurotech Innovation for Temporal Lobe Seizure Prediction and Detection”
3rd Prize: Francesca Romana Centini - “T-OBE or not t-OBE?”
Many thanks to the rest of the team for helping make this event the success it was. Jared Stoloff, Anish Kochhar, and Bruno Hawkins for chairing the event, Dhanvanth Srinivasan for promotion and photography, and Alisa Kennan for her excellent treasury skills.
It was a pleasure to run this event, and we can't wait to put bigger and better events throughout the year!
If you are interested in joining us for more, be sure to sign up to our 𝐡𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐧 here: https://lu.ma/7b0z77bh
