The 2017 UCD Conway Festival of Research & Innovation got under way last week with lectures and presentations by leading scientists from varied fields.
The festival, now in its seventeenth year, serves to highlight the substantial scientific research and innovation achievements being undertaken by the scientists and researchers of the UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research. The annual event aims to celebrate the work that is going on at the moment with lectures from scientists from industry, academia, and clinical settings complemented with scientific talks, poster presentations and a career discussion forum for budding researchers.
“It’s about linking ideas, linking people, getting discussions going and starting new collaborations” –
Topics covered ranged from cell signalling, cancer cell state maintenance, neurodegeneration, yeast evolution, comparative and integrative genomics, obesity, and botany.
Giovanna Mallucci from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Cambridge University gave superb insight into the mechanisms and possible treatment in neurodegenerative diseases in her lecture, ‘Neurodegeneration: from molecules to medicines’. In her talk, Mallucci expressed how the combination of a decrease in synapse number and increase in the accumulation of misfolded proteins lead to neuronal loss.
Orla Daly – Science Editor
