By Michelle Jaffee
Early–career researchers in age-related brain diseases and senior colleagues came together in Atlanta Oct. 10-12 for the Southeastern Neurodegenerative Disease Conference (SENDCon), exploring topics ranging from genetics to health disparities to neuroinflammation and more.
Over 500 participants representing 36 states and 34 countries attended either in person or virtually and heard presentations on some of the latest advances in the field.
“The goal of this was really to focus on early–career investigators,” Jada Lewis, Ph.D., deputy director of UF’s McKnight Brain Institute, said in opening remarks. “There’s a lot of variability on where people are in their training to go to the next step of their career. And we wanted to give some sort of basics to where you get exposed to starting in a variety of different career trajectories, and then going on into professional skills that you’ll need at various stages of your career.”
Hosted by the Alzheimer’s Association, with leadership from Lewis and Malú Gámez Tansey, Ph.D., of the McKnight Brain Institute; Melissa E. Murray, Ph.D., of Mayo Clinic Jacksonville; and Laura J. Blair, Ph.D., of the University of South Florida, SENDCon is aimed at building a collaborative network for investigators from the southeastern U.S. and Puerto Rico. Areas of study include Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, frontotemporal dementias, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, stroke and traumatic brain injury.
This year’s poster winners were:
- Christine Bowen of Emory University for “Microglial Kv3.1 channel regulation of immune response in Alzheimer’s disease models”
- Cemal Akmese of UF for “a-Synuclein Regulation of Midbrain Dopaminergic Neurons”
