Congratulations to our 2017 Laszlo and Etelka Kollar Travel Award Recipients:
Sarah Hirsiger studied Human Movement Sciences at the ETH Zurich and received her Master’s Diploma in September 2010. In 2014 she completed her PhD, where she investigated neuroanatomical and functional differences in healthy aging adults at the International Normal Aging and Plasticity Imaging Center (INAPIC, University of Zurich, headed by Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Lutz Jäncke and Prof. Dr. Mike Martin). Currently Sarah is working as a Postdoctoral-Fellow at the Experimental and Clinical Pharmacopsychology Group in the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich. Her research mainly focuses on gaining more insights into neuroplasticity (mainly neuroanatomical changes) associated with cocaine use.
She joined the Computational Brain Anatomy Laboratory (PI: Prof. Mallar M. Chakravarty) in Montreal in September 2017 for 5 weeks. During her stay she learned to successfully apply the MAGeT-toolbox that was developed in-house. With the help of MAGeT she was able to analyze morphology outputs (i.e., displacement and 3D surface area) of neuroanatomical structures.
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“It was a great privilege to visit the CoBrA Lab at McGill University and work with a young and thriving team of excellent researchers. With the support of the Kollar award I was able to expand my scientific network in a city leading in Neuroscience Breakthroughs."
Sana Suri is a postdoctoral researcher in the Oxford Department of Psychiatry and Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity. Her research combines different neuroimaging methods to understand cognitive decline in ageing.
Sana received her undergraduate degree in Life Sciences from the National University of Singapore and her Masters in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. She obtained her DPhil in Psychiatry in 2016 with a Clarendon Scholarship at Keble College Oxford, Her doctoral research with Professor Clare Mackay revealed early impairments in the brain's vascular health in young adults at a genetic risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.
In spring 2018, Sana will join Dr Mallar Chakravarty’s lab in McGill for a project investigating whether risk factors for dementia are linked with an accelerated rate of brain ageing.
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“I am grateful for the opportunity to visit McGill on the Kollar Award. This fellowship will allow me to sink my teeth into new machine learning methods and train in multi-modal neuroimaging analysis from a leading expert in the field. I am excited to bring a new perspective to my research on risk and resilience in ageing.”