Celebrating its 25 years as a joint centre of the Miguel Hernández University (UMH) of Elche and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is the goal of the scientific symposium organized by the Institute of Neurosciences (IN) on the occasion of its anniversary. The event, which will take place on July 25^th and 26^th, will be held in the IN’s Auditorium, located in the Santiago Ramón y Cajal building on the Sant Joan d’Alacant campus. Additionally, as a large audience is expected, the symposium will be broadcast in Meeting Room II of the IN and in Room 8 of the Balmis building.

The symposium programme consists of highly prestigious international speakers in the field of neuroscience who have been linked with the IN over the years, either because they completed their doctorate there or led research groups, or because collaborated at the institutional level. All the directors the IN has had since its founding will also participate.

The first session, which will begin tomorrow at 3:00 PM, will focus on the early days of the institution and will feature interventions by Carlos Belmonte, founder of the Institute and professor emeritus at UMH; Mel Slater, researcher at the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona, whose talk will be about virtual spaces applied to neuroscience and technology; Mavi Sánchez-Vives, investigator at the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS), who will talk about the cortical dynamics of the brain; the Cajal Institute researcher Liset Menéndez de la Prida, who will address the topic of spatial memory; Albert Compte, researcher at IDIBAPS and former Ramón y Cajal researcher at the IN, who will discuss the dysfunction of cortical plasticity in schizophrenia and encephalitis; and finally, Óscar Marín, director of the Developmental Neurobiology Department at King’s College London, who led the Neuronal Migration and Assembly in the Cerebral Cortex laboratory at the IN for a decade.

Friday's session, beginning at 9:30 AM, will be led by Salvador Martínez and will feature presentations by Beatriz Rico, researcher at King’s College who led the Formation and Refinement of Neural Circuits group at the IN for several years, who will discuss the assembly of cortical circuits; Manuel Valiente, researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), who completed his doctorate in Óscar Marín’s lab at the IN and will address strategies to reduce the lethality of brain metastasis; the University College London researcher Michael Hausser, who has been part of the IN's External Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) for eight years and will talk about the relationship between neuronal activity circuits and behavior; Richard Morris, professor at the University of Edinburgh and current director of the Remedios Caro Almela Chair of Neurobiology; and finally, the researcher and former IN director Juan Lerma, who will close the symposium with a retrospective on the times of the institution’s consolidation.

The anniversary closing ceremony will feature speeches by UMH rector Juan José Ruiz; current IN director Ángel Barco; the Regional Secretary of Universities of the Generalitat Valenciana, Esther Gómez; the mayor of Sant Joan d’Alacant, Santiago Román; the CSIC president Eloisa del Pino; and the Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities, Diana Morant.

Source: Institute for Neurosciences CSIC-UMH (in.comunicacion@umh.es)