Blue Brain's Cristina Colangelo wins Best Flash Talk

The first Swiss Early-Career Researchers Symposium ‘Neural population coding and emergent properties of cell assemblies’, took place at the Campus Biotech, Geneva on Thursday 31 January, preceding the annual Swiss Society for Neuroscience meeting. The event was organized by the young Swiss Society for Neuroscience – a team of PhD students and postdocs aiming to improve synergy and scientific exchange between young scientists in Switzerland.

The programme included talks by two young scientists from Blue Brain. Max Nolte presented ‘Cortical reliability amid noise and chaos’ in the morning session with Cristina Colangelo giving a flash talk on ‘A framework for multi-scale cholinergic neuromodulation of the neocortex: bridging synapses, dendrites, neurons, and network states’ during the afternoon session. Cristina was then named the inaugural winner of the award for the Best Flash Talk.

Cristina, a co-author of the paper, ‘Data-Driven Modeling of Cholinergic Modulation of Neural Microcircuits: Bridging Neurons, Synapses and Network Activity’ published in Frontiers in Neural Circuits in 2018, was delighted to receive her award. She explained, “I tried to convey the message that everything can’t be measured experimentally and we need an integrative framework to bring together existing knowledge as a way to predict missing information. In this way, we could really advance our understanding of the brain. So I am very pleased that my talk was selected for the award.”