This week, the team are talking all things brain related to kick off Brain Awareness Week.
Brain Awareness Week is a global campaign intended to elevate public knowledge about the progress and benefits of brain and nervous system research. The Australian Neuroscience Society organises events during this week to engage scientists, physicians and the community in understanding brain function and expanding awareness of neurological disorders. The theme this year is stroke.
Guest 1: Geoffrey A. Donnan
Geoff is the Director of the Florey Neuroscience Institutes and Professor of Neurology, University of Melbourne. He was founder of the National Stroke Research Institute and is world-renown for his interests in stroke research, particularly neuroimaging and clinical trials. Geoff discusses research into brain neuroplasticity and compounds to assist recovery from a stroke.
Guest 2: Heather Young
In her spare time, Heather is the State Coordinator for Australian Brain Bee Challenge: a competition for Year 10 secondary students to motivate them to get interested to learn about the brain. The competition is in 3 parts. The first part is an online quiz held in the schools during Brain Awareness Week in March. Students who score well in round 1 will be invited to the University of Melbourne for a day for the state finals, where both individual and school champions are decided. The state finals are great fun, and as well as participating in the quiz, the students get tours of laboratories at the university or institutes. Finally, each state winner then competes in a national final that is held in Australian or New Zealand.
For more info on how to get involved click here.
Guest 3: Ramesh Rajan
Ramesh is trying to understand the mechanisms that brain nerve cells use to make sense of the world. To do this, he studies:
(a) How the brain processes the information we get through the sense of touch,
(b) How the brain integrates information from hearing and vision to get a holistic world view, and
(c) How humans learn to understand information presented in a noisy and crowded world.
To understand these processes he examines the responses or the skills of humans when tested with visual or auditory signals, or the responses of nerve cells in the brains of animals presented with tactile, auditory or visual signals.
Guest 4: Dr Judy de Haan
There is an increasing appreciation amongst health researchers that oxidative stress (the increase in damaging free radicals), underpins many human diseases. Diabetes and it major complications is no exception. One way to combat oxidative stress is to increase one’s intake of antioxidants such as vitamins C and E. But clinical studies looking at the effectiveness of antioxidants have been largely disappointing.
Judy is the Head of the Oxidative Stress Laboratory at the Baker Institute and she is interested in finding novel antioxidant therapies to treat diabetic complications such as heart and kidney disease. Recently her group discovered that an important antioxidant gene is involved in the protection against fatty build-up within the arterial walls of diabetic mice. Based on this important information, Dr de Haan and her team are now exploring whether compounds that mimic the action of this gene, hold promise as new therapeutic treatments against diabetic complications.
Other segments:
-use of mathematical modelling for crime fighting
-how wind energy could be effectively used to charge electric cars overnight
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Direct podcast download: Einstein-A-Go-Go-20100221.mp3
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