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QBI EVENTS

FOLLOW the links below for more information or scroll down the page to browse QBI's forthcoming events. Bookmark this page to stay up-to-date with future announcements.

Upcoming events 2010

MND Symposium

Short Course in Computational Neuroscience

Upcoming events 2009

Special Summer School on Animal Navigation

Archived Events 2009

Inaugural Merson Lecture

Peter Goodenough Memorial Lecture

Queensland Brain Institute 2009 Advanced Neuroscience Seminar Series

Frontiers in Spinal Cord Research

UQ's Celebration of Science

 Motor Neuron Disease Symposium

ANS Satellite Meeting

4 – 5 February, 2010

Queensland Brain Institute
The University of Queensland
Brisbane, Australia

Aimed at promoting links between members of the MND research community, this symposium will highlight current developments in MND research and give scientists from diverse fields the opportunity to come together to discuss current advances, share ideas and perspectives, and to set the stage for future discoveries.

A series of oral and poster presentations will illustrate the quality and breadth of research in this field. All participants, particularly students, are encouraged to submit abstracts for the poster session.

Guest speakers include:

Professor Donald Cleveland, Chair of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, UCSD, USA
Professor Guy Rouleau, Director, CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center, Canada
Professor Dario Farina, Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction, Aalborg University, Denmark
Professor Peter Schofield, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, NSW
Professor Charles Watson, Executive Dean of Health Sciences at Curtin University of Technology, WA

For registration information please click here.

Please click here to download the conference PROGRAM.

Conference FLYER can be downloaded here.

Supported by the Peter Goodenough MND Research Laboratory at the Queensland Brain Institute.

Further information can be found at www.qbi.uq.edu.au and following the Events link, or by e-mailing events@qbi.uq.edu.au

Inaugural Merson Lecture

Short bio  —  Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti

Giacomo Rizzolatti is Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Parma where he is the Director of the Department of Neurosciences. Formerly President of the European Brain and Behaviour Society and the Italian Society for Neuroscience, as well as a member of the European Medical Research Council, Professor Rizzolatti has, for several years, directed the European Training Program in Brain and Behaviour Research sponsored by the European Science Foundation. Among Professor Rizzolatti’s major awards are the Golgi

Prize for Physiology, the George Miller Award of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Feltrinelli Prize for Medicine, the Herlitzka Prize for Physiology and the Grawemeyer Prize for Psychology.

Event: Inaugural Merson Lecture

Speaker: Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti

When: Thursday November 5, 2009 - 5:00pm - 6:00pm

Where: Auditorium, Level 7
Queensland Brain Institute
Building 79, Upland Road
The University of Queensland
St Lucia campus

RSVP:  A cocktail party will take place after the lecture. Please reply by calling 07-3346 6300 or e-mailing events@qbi.uq.edu.au

Please click here to download the flyer for this event.

Peter Goodenough Memorial Lecture

Join us at QBI on Thursday, 27 August to hear distinguished Australian scientist Professor Harvey Whiteford present the 2009 Peter Goodenough Memorial Lecture.

The lecture is named in honour of the late Mr Peter Goodenough, a QBI benefactor whose personal battle with motor neuron disease (MND) led to an inspirational private bequest for scientific research into MND.

Professor Whiteford’s lecture will provide an overview of the mortality and disability caused by mental and neurological disorders around the world and an update from the new Global Burden of Disease Study now underway. It will then summarise the challenges facing policy makers in reducing the clinical, social and economic impact of these disorders and the implication for research arising from these challenges.

Short bio  —  Professor Harvey Whiteford

Professor Harvey Whiteford trained in medicine, psychiatry and public health in Queensland and at Stanford University in the USA. On his return to Australia in 1986 he established what is now the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research, one of Australia’s leading mental health research centres. Professor Whiteford has held senior clinical and administrative positions in Australia, including those of Director of Mental Health in the Queensland (1989 to 1996) and Federal government (1997 to 1999).

In 1999 he was appointed to the first mental health position at the World Bank in Washington DC where he worked to develop the Bank’s capacity to respond to the rising global burden of mental disorders. He continues to work with the Australian government and international agencies on the design, implementation and evaluation of mental health programs.

Event: Peter Goodenough Memorial Lecture

Speaker: Professor Harvey Whiteford

When: Thursday, 27 August 2009 (6.00 — 7.00 pm)

Where: Auditorium, Level 7
Queensland Brain Institute
Building 79, Upland Road
The University of Queensland
St Lucia campus

RSVP:  Light refreshments will be served after the lecture. Please RSVP by calling 3346 6300 or e-mailing events@qbi.uq.edu.au 

Queensland Brain Institute 2009 Advanced Neuroscience Seminar Series

Five Public Seminars – “Building a Brain” (each is approximately 1.5 hours in length)

Members of the public are invited to attend the following series of lectures, which will be held in the auditorium on level 7 of the Queensland Brain Institute on the dates outlined below.

A/Prof. Elliott Sherr, MD/PhD University of California, San Francisco	Seminar One – Wednesday, 15 July “Developmental and genetic causes of epilepsy and agenesis of the corpus callosum”
	iPhone (317MB)	High Res (737MB)

A/Prof. Geoffrey J. Goodhill, PhD Queensland Brain Institute, Brisbane	Seminar Two – Wednesday, 22 July “Building a Brain – wiring the brain”
	iPhone (595MB)	High Res (2.6GB)

Prof. Seong-Seng Tan, D. Phil Howard Florey Institute, Melbourne	Seminar Three – Wednesday, 29 July “Building a Brain – harm minimisation following injury”
	iPhone (494 MB)	High Res (2.4 GB)

Prof. Dennis D.M. O’Leary, PhD The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, USA	Seminar Four – Wednesday, 5 August “Building a Brain – building the cerebral cortex”
	iPhone (680 MB)	High Res (3.9 GB)

Prof. Michael T. Shipley, PhD University of Maryland, School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA Please note that it appears some of this video file has become corrupted but the audio is fine.	Seminar Four – Wednesday, 13 August “Building a Brain – deciphering functional circuits in the brain”
	iPhone (667 MB)	High Res (3.1 GB)

 FRONTIERS IN SPINAL CORD RESEARCH

The Frontiers in Spinal Cord Research conference will bring together world experts in the field of spinal cord injury and repair research. Recently, great advances have been made in the science of spinal cord repair and, increasingly, such advances are finding their way from the laboratory to the clinic. This promising aspect will be a key focus of the conference.

Queensland Brain Institute
7 – 8 September 2009

International speakers include:

• Professor Hideyuki Okano, Keio University, Japan
• Professor John Steeves, ICORD, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Professor John Kessler, Northwestern University, USA
• Asst Professor Masaya Nakamura, Keio University, Japan
• Professor Alain Privat, Institute for Neuroscience, Montpellier, France
• Assoc Professor Yaobo Liu, The State Key Lab of Brain and Cognitive Science, China

All participants, particularly students, are encouraged to submit abstracts for the poster session*.

The cost of attending the conference is $220 or $110 for students. The fee will cover your registration, program booklet, morning and afternoon teas, lunches and a conference dinner.

REGISTRATION

PROGRAM

Email Alison van Niekerk (a.vanniekerk@uq.edu.au) for more information.

Special Summer School on Animal Navigation

(8th ACEVS-CVS Summer School on Animal navigation)

Jointly organised and sponsored by ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science/Centre for Visual Sciences and Thinking Systems (UQ).

Where:  Queensland Brain Institute (QBI), The University of Queensland (UQ, St Lucia Campus)
Brisbane, Australia

When: 23 Nov – 27 Nov 2009

The goal of the “Summer School on Animal Navigation” is to introduce students from Australia, New Zealand and other countries to the fascinating and rapidly developing multi-disciplinary research field of “Animal Navigation”. The mechanisms of animal navigation are a hot research topic internationally, in biology and in robotics. A diverse range of animal species are discussed in the lectures to illustrate the many challenges, physiological adaptations, and computational principles used in nature to carry out various navigation tasks.

This year the invited speakers include leading researchers from the United States, Germany, Israel, New Zealand and around Australia. For the first time, the Summer School will be held at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. This one-week summer school was originally established at the Australian National University in 2002 and has become an annual event. This year, it will be co-sponsored by the Thinking Systems research group based at The University of Queensland. Previous responses from participants (including speakers) at this course have been overwhelmingly positive. Several research collaborations and publications have resulted from discussions begun at previous Summer Schools.

We plan to have daily sessions of lectures, seminars and practical demonstrations, in a discussion-based, round-table environment, on the following topics:

• Principles, concepts and key experiments in animal and robot navigation.

• Sensory physiology, neurobiology, neurocomputational models, from arthropods to mammals.

• Landmark guidance, view-based homing, path integration, odometry, optic flow processing and biological compasses.

• Diverse challenges and solutions of microbial to transcontinental navigation.

• Basic and advanced topics in neuro-ethological robots.

• Animal/human field navigation experiment.

Target Audience

Final year undergraduates, honours, masters, PhD students, early post-docs from
Biology, Psychology, Robotics from
Australia, New Zealand, and other countries

Australian and Overseas Lecturers

Michael Arbib, Ken Cheng, Peter Corke, Geoff Goodhill, Justin Marshall, Jason Mattingley, Jonathan Roberts, MV Srinivasan, Nachum Ulanovsky, Janet Wiles, Roswitha Wiltschko, Wolfgang Wiltschko, Gordon Wyeth, Jochen Zeil ... and many others.

Numbers are limited. Registration is fully subsidised. Limited travel and accommodation grants are available on a competitive basis.

Application and further details click here.

UQ'S CELEBRATION OF SCIENCE

In 2009, The University of Queensland (UQ) is proud to bring you all the colour, vibrance and excitement of science through its Celebration of Science program. The Celebration of Science is brought to you from across science at UQ and is a collaboration between the University’s Faculty of Science, Faculty of Natural Resources, Agriculture and Veterinary Science, the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, the Queensland Brain Institute, and the Diamantina Institute for Cancer, Immunology and Metabolic Medicine.  MORE  ...