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Elżbieta Pyza
Elżbieta Pyza
Chair of the Scientific Committee
President of the Polish Neuroscience Society









 
 
Dear Neuroscientists,
On behalf of the Polish Neuroscience Society I cordially invite you to the 16th Congress of the Polish Neuroscience Society. Our Society international meetings are organised every two years and in 2023 the meeting will be held in Toruń, Nicolaus Copernicus city, in Poland.

We are preparing an excellent scientific programme with six plenary lectures, fifteen symposia and several special lectures. Plenary lectures will be given by outstanding neuroscientists and all of them have already confirmed their participation in the meeting. Symposia have been selected by the Scientific Committee from proposals sent to the Organising Committee.

The full programme  is available here. Beside the interesting scientific programme, we are preparing an exciting social programme. We hope that our meeting will be a great chance to meet neuroscientists from many countries in Europe and from other continents.  
 
 


Dear Participants,
It is a great pleasure and honor to invite you to the XVIth International Congress of the Polish Neuroscience Society, which will take place in Toruń from 20 to 23 September 2023. This upcoming conference is expected to be an important and remarkable event for neuroscientists from around the world as well as a great occasion to rejoin again after these difficult pandemic times. 
This is really great that the upcoming PNS meeting will be held in such a beautiful spot in northern Poland as Toruń… This is the small and cosy city, situated on the Vistula River, where someone can face with history, culture and charming gothic architecture. The city is famous for being the place of birth of the eminent astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus and well-preserved medieval monuments. 
The event is co-organized by Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.##MORE## The conference venue will be Institute of Psychology and Academic Center of Culture and Art “Od Nowa”, both located in the green part of university campus. There are recently modernized university buildings with comfort and modernly equipped lecture rooms as well as the large areas for commercial exhibitions, poster sessions, lunch and coffee breaks. 
The Organizing Committee is keen to make the XVIth International Congress of the Polish Neuroscience Society a memorable, fruitful scientific and social event. An attractive social program will include Welcome Reception on Wednesday, Conference Gala Dinner on Friday and some tourist attractions. 
On behalf of the Organizing Committee, I would like to make sure that all Participants find this conference stimulating, rewarding and important for discussion and networking. We hope you will take this opportunity to visit one of most attractive Polish town.
We look forward to welcome you to Toruń in 2023!





Speakers


Christian Keysers
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, The Netherlands
Prof Dr Christian Keysers: Of German and French origin, in 2000, after a PhD in neuroscience, Christian joined Giacomo Rizzolatti as a postdoc in Italy and studied how mirror neurons process the actions of others.##MORE##Together with Valeria Gazzola, he then built up the Social Brain Lab in Groningen where their human fMRI work showed participants activate their own actions, emotions and sensations while they witness those of others and this neural marker of empathy is reduced in patients with psychopathy. Since 2010, he leads the comparative social neuroscience effort within the Social Brain Lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam where he investigates the neural basis of empathy and prosociality across species. He is also a professor of social neuroscience at the UvA, his publications have been cited >30’000, he is a member of the Academia Europaea and his work is summarized in the book The empathic brain.
Carl Petersen
EPFL Brain Mind Institute,Lausanne, Switzerland
Carl Petersen studied physics as a bachelor student in Oxford (1989-1992). During his PhD studies under the supervision of Prof. Sir Michael Berridge in Cambridge (1992-1996), he investigated cellular and molecular mechanisms of calcium signalling.##MORE## In his first postdoctoral period (1996-1998), he joined the laboratory of Prof. Roger Nicoll at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to investigate synaptic transmission and plasticity in the hippocampus. During a second postdoctoral period, in the laboratory of Prof. Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg (1999-2003), he began working on the primary somatosensory barrel cortex, investigating cortical circuits and sensory processing. Carl Petersen joined the Brain Mind Institute of the Faculty of Life Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2003, setting up the Laboratory of Sensory Processing (https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lsens/) to investigate the functional operation of neuronal circuits in awake mice during quantified behavior. In 2019, Carl Petersen became the Director of the EPFL Brain Mind Institute, with the goal to promote quantitative multidisciplinary research into neural structure, function, dysfunction, computation and therapy through technological advances.
Maria Grazia Spillantini
Cambridge University, United Kingdom
Born in Arezzo (Italy), Maria Grazia Spillantini received a Laurea in Biological Sciences from Florence University and a PhD in Molecular Biology from Cambridge University working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. ##MORE##In 1996 she moved to the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Cambridge University, where she was first a Lecturer, then a Reader, and since 2007 Professor of Molecular Neurology. Her interest is on tauopathies and alpha-synucleinopathies. With her collaborators, she identified alpha-synuclein as the component of the filaments that form the Lewy bodies in Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and the glial inclusions in multiple system atrophy and described one of the first mutations in the MAPT gene causing frontotemporal dementia. She has received several awards, including the Potamkin Prize and the Jay Van Andel award for achievements in Parkinson’s disease, the Golgi Medal, the Thudicum Medal and the European Grand Prix of the French Fondation Recherce Alzheimer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, Royal Society of Biology, Clare Hall (Cambridge) and Officer of the Star of Italy.


Bożena Kamińska
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland
Bozena Kaminska graduated from the Faculty of Biology at the University of Warsaw in 1985, and obtained her PhD in biochemistry at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1991. ##MORE##After postdoctoral training at the Mc Gill University in Montreal (Canada), she has obtained habilitation at the Nencki Institute in 1997, and in 2003 become a full professor. Currently she is working at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology PAS in Warsaw, where she heads the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology. Since 2009 she is the director of the Postgraduate School of Molecular Medicine of the Medical University of Warsaw. She is an elected member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2016) and European Molecular Biology Organization. Her international training encompasses a postdoctoral internship at the McGill University in Montreal, a visiting researcher at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA in Los Angeles and the visiting Nanshan Scholar professorship at the Medical University of Guangzhou. She specializes in molecular neurobiology, neuro-oncology and tumor immunology. Through mechanistic understanding of the crosstalk between the immune system and tumor she aims to contribute to the design of novel immunomodulatory strategies to fight uncurable brain tumors. She has pioneered single-cell omics studies of brain tumor microenvironment. In her career, she was a principal investigator in 44 domestic and international research grants, including grants from the National Science Center (Maestro, Harmonia, Symphony, OPUS), National Center for Research and Development (Strategmed 1, 2, 3), Foundation for Polish Science (Master, Team-Tech Core Facility), a NATO grant, EU subsidies in two Framework Programs and ERANET grants. She promoted 27 doctors, 3 habilitated doctors and 10 Master students. Her achievements include 147 scientific publications (e.g. in Nature Communications, Cell and PNAS) cited over 7,000 times (Hirsch index = 44) and 10 chapters in books. Bozena Kaminska received a prestigious FNP Award in 2021.
Zoltan Molnar
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Zoltán Molnár was trained as a medical doctor before he pursued his DPhil at University of Oxford. He also worked at Kyoto Prefectural School of Medicine at Japan and University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is currently Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. ##MORE##He is also associated to Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin as an Einstein Visiting Fellow. Professor Zoltán Molnár made major contributions to understanding mechanisms, which control the guidance of thalamocortical projections. His current research focus is on the cortical arealization. He is exploring the interactions of genetic and environmental factors that determine functional subdivisions in the cortex. In addition to his research and teaching activities, he serves as an editor to 10 scientific journals and is involved in exciting initiatives such as the Oxford Martin School Programme of 3D Printing for Brain Repair, Cortex Club, History of Medical Sciences Oxford Project. He authored three books and several book chapters. For more information visit https://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/team/zoltan-molnar
Inbal Goshen
The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Prof, Inbal Goshen pursued a double doctoral project in neurobiology and psychology, then to directly modulate the activity of specific neuronal populations in a spatially and temporally precise manner, she joined the lab of Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University. ##MORE##In 2012, she joined ELSC at the Hebrew University, and established her independent research group, focusing mainly on the non-neuronal brain cells called astrocytes, and their role in higher brain function. In recent years the lab has published papers in Nature, Cell, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Glia.
 


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