Over the course of three days, twenty internationally renowned speakers shared their latest neurotechnology research in front of a captivated audience in the University Halls of Leuven.
Two keynote speakers opened the Neurotechnologies conference, after which participants joined a reception in City Hall accompanied by a speech by the mayor of Leuven. The following two days were packed with talks, covering a wide array of topics: from nanotechnologies, brain-machine interfaces, and imaging approaches to neuroethics. Upcoming researchers also had the chance to present their work in the poster sessions and the journal Neuron offered a poster prize for the best presentation. Mariela Zirlinger, Editor-in-Chief of Neuron, handed out the prize to Ernesto Ciabatti from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge with his research on “Combining life-long circuit mapping and network transcriptomics with SiR-N2c.” Additonally, eight scientists were given the opportunity to take the plenary stage and share their research. Afterwards, the conference dinner at the Faculty Club was the cherry on top.
In the words of organizing committee member Sebastian Haesler: “Since the beginning of NERF, we bring together world leaders in the field of neuroengineering to share their latest results and ideas at this conference. Everyone attending could witness how neurotechnologies open completely new avenues for understanding and restoring nervous system function.”
India Jane Wise, neuroscience communications expert at VIB, was also present: “I really enjoyed the conference. I got to know the field more by listening to what other researchers around the world are working on. Even though I work with groundbreaking research daily, I was again hugely impressed by the current advances in neuroscience. Being at the conference also gave me the opportunity to interact with many participants and speakers. The nice food didn’t hurt either!”
Below are some of the impressions of the three conference reporters of the event:
Diana Piol (Postdoctoral fellow at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research)
"It was inspiring to participate in Neurotechnologies 2022 and hear the latest scientific achievements from top-notch scientists in the field. The conference was a mixture of engineering and neuroscience, bringing together two diverse but interconnected topics to achieve the final goal of curing diseases and improving the quality of life of patients and families, from the technology to the bedside. The success of Neurotechnologies 2022 resides in this crucial aspect, a perfect blend for the successful ideation of applications in diverse fields of neuroscience, bringing together already established experts but also allowing early career researchers of the next scientific generation to gather and exchange ideas on the future with selected talks and poster sessions.
I was very impressed by the insightful session on cell technologies for the modeling of diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to spinal cord injury, with top-notch speakers such as Malin Parmar, Kobi Koffler and Sergiu Pasca, followed by the latest advancements in next-generation optical neurotechnologies with the talks from the renowned speakers Na Ji and Alipasha Vaziri.
With its multidisciplinary program and extensive social and scientific interactions, I am looking forward to having the opportunity to participate in the next edition of Neurotechnologies."
Lorenzo Ghezzi (PhD Student at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research)
"After three days of intense scientific discussion and events at Neurotechnologies22, I finally had time to reflect on my experience during the conference. I was captivated by the applications and improvements in biomedical science through the integration of neuroscience and neuroengineering, presented during the conference. A perfect example of this was the opening talk of Jocelyne Bloch and Gregoire Courtine , where they created and optimized a device for electrical stimulation of patients with spinal cord damage that dramatically improved patient’s movement. At the same time, it allowed them to identify and study a mechanism of recovery and reinforcement of the synapses at the injured site in patients and mice. I was also very intrigued by Malin Parmar, who utilizes the rabies virus to study the connectivity of grafted hEPS-derived DA cells in the xenograft rat model of PD.
Finally, I particularly enjoyed the poster sessions, where I could network with many colleagues and hear directly about their work. I believe that networking and integrating different expertise are crucial to finding the answers to several open questions in neuroscience. As a reporter during the conference, I also enjoyed learning and discussing on Twitter how the integration of different expertise is being used to push the limits of our knowledge."
Clément Brunner (Postdoctoral fellow at NERF)
"As I merge neuroscience and tech-dev in my day-to-day research work, I highly appreciated the great line-up of speakers and the immense diversity of subjects covered during the 2022 edition of the Neurotechnologies conference.
Among great talks on neurotech and joint efforts made into R&Ds, I found the presentation of Cynthia Chestek and Edward Chang on the advancement of neuroprosthetics (arm and speech) and recent application into the clinical realm particularly interesting.
While controversial and thought-provoking, the most inspiring lecture for me was that of Nita Farahany on the ethics and social implications of emerging (neuro)technologies.
I also am grateful for the fantastic opportunity to live-report this event, teaching me about a new way to attend a conference."
During the conference organizing committee member Sandrine da Cruz was also interviewed on her experiences. Read it on the VIB Blog.
