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Our annual Thomas Willis Day is a chance to celebrate the work of our Department, with a particular focus on our postgraduate students.

The day began with the postgraduate poster competition. All our current students submitted a poster and they were judged by a panel. The winners were:

  • Year One: Yuen Siang Ang, 'Apathy and Option Generation'
  • Year Two: Adam Berrington, 'Improved Detection of 2HG in Human Brain Tumours'
  • Year Three: Jessica Rodgers, ‘Characterisation of a novel ENU-induced spectral tuning mutation in melanopsin’

The Head of Department, Professor Chris Kennard, then presented this year's departmental prizes. The winners were:

Thomas Willis Early Career Researcher Prize

  • Winner: John Stewart Webb, 'Physiological Correlates of beat‐to‐beat, ambulatory and day‐to‐day home blood pressure variability after transient ischaemic attack or minor stroke'
  • Runner up: Charlotte Stagg, 'Local GABA concentration is related to network-level resting functional connectivity'

Thomas Willis Senior Career Researcher Prize

  • Winner: Robert MacLaren, 'Retinal gene therapy in patients with choroideremia: initial findings from a phase 1/2 clinical trial'
  • Runner up: Natalie Voets, ''Aberrant Functional Connectivity in Dissociable Hippocampal Networks is Associated with Deficits in Memory'

NDCN Department Award for Excellence

  • Rachel Butler, for her work as the Facilities Manager for the Department

NDCN Department Award for Outreach Activity

  • Joint Winners: Holly Bridge and Stuart Clare, for outstanding contributions to a very wide range of outreach on behalf of the Department

Finally, our visitor Professor Maria Grazia Spillantini FRS from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge gave the 2015 Thomas Willis Lecture: ‘Protein aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases: untangling the tangled brain’.