Speakers
Antón Barreiro-Iglesias is a Junior Principal Investigator in the Department of Functional Biology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) since 2016 after being awarded with 2 career development grants from the Xunta de Galicia and the Francisco Cobos Foundation.
Antón completed his PhD in Biology with Honours and International Mention at the USC in 2010. His thesis focused on the study of the development and organization of the monoaminergic systems of lampreys and was awarded with the Extraordinary Thesis Prize of the USC. For his postdoctoral period, he moved to the spinal cord injury (SCI) field and to the use of lampreys and zebrafish as animal models of successful and spontaneous spinal cord regeneration in laboratories in the US and UK. His work has focused mainly on the study of the death of brain neurons after SCI and on the role of neurotransmitters in neuronal survival and regeneration. Antón has been awarded with several competitive fellowships and grants from national and international organizations during his predoctoral and postdoctoral periods and has published 60 articles and 3 book chapters in the field of neuroscience. |
Phillip Popovich completed his PhD training in physiology and spinal cord injury (SCI) at Ohio State University (OSU) where he is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Director of OSU’s Center for Brain and Spinal Cord Repair and Executive Director of the Belford Center for Spinal Cord Injury. As a post-doctoral fellow, also at OSU, he was awarded a Sandoz Research Fellowship that supported his formal training in immunology and CNS autoimmune diseases. His research program is focused on understanding how SCI disrupts communication between the nervous and immune systems leading to a state of chronic immune dysfunction, including immune suppression and “metainflammation”.
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Miguel Pais-Vieira is an FCT Investigator (equivalent to assistant professor) at the Institute of Health Sciences, Portuguese Catholic University and at the Institute of Health and Life Sciences, University of Minho. He is currently working in brain-machine interfaces and sensorimotor integration. For this he compares how active and passive tactile processing affect the neural dynamics of sensory processing in rodent (single unit and LFPs) as well as in humans (EEG). He is currently combining these concepts to develop brain-machine interfaces where virtual reality, tactile stimuli, monetary reward, and robotic assisted gait are combined to improve or restore neurological function
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Dr. McTigue's laboratory focuses on the role of adult progenitor cells after CNS injury or disease. These cells have been shown to form new oligodendrocytes in vivo after demyelination, and to form oligodendrocytes, astrocytes and neurons in vitro. In recent studies, they determined that these cells spontaneously form a large number of new oligodendrocytes and remyelinate axons for several months after spinal cord injury. The long-term goal of these studies is to determine how the formation of new cells in the adult CNS is regulated and whether this process can be manipulated to promote greater anatomical and functional recovery from spinal cord injury and other CNS disorders. This work has relevance not only to traumatic injury but also conditions such as multiple sclerosis and even normal aging.
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