We are already closing out almost the second month of 2023, and the first week of the new session with our new cohort of students. It shocked me to calculate that in April, we are ticking over 5 years since starting the MINDS lab. I am proud of all we have achieved in the face of challenges and career disruptions, particularly our ongoing resourcefulness and productivity, possible only because of the excellent calibre of our students. I am convinced only good things are coming in 2023.
We are delighted to have our new PhD student, Katrina Edmond join us after a successful Honours year, as well as our new Honours students Adrianna Brittain and Amelia Davis. I had the pleasure to teach Adrianna and Amelia as undergrads last year. Katrina will be doing her PhD on the topic of amygdala, stress and neurogenesis, Adrianna will be focusing on microglia, and Amelia is honing in on blood brain barrier abnormalities, all in the context of stress and mental illness. We are looking forward to our new bioinformatics PhD student, Tamim Ahsan, joining us mid-year all the way from Dhaka, to work on our single cell and spatial omics projects.
Over the course of 2022, most of our lab worked in some way towards completion of a major project which we finally saw published a few weeks ago in Acta Neuropathologica. Our paper explores the cell-type specific expression patterns of a stress-regulated gene, FKBP5, in the postmortem neocortex and how it is altered across major psychiatric disorders. Our results suggest that maybe FKBP51 targeting drugs could be developed to improve cognition in schizophrenia, and perhaps specifically in older patients. A huge thank you to Katrina and Dominic especially, whose Honours theses comprised a substantial chunk of the journal revisions, and also our many collaborators who made the work possible. We are all really glad to see it published.
We have big plans for 2023, including the launch of our adult hippocampal neurogenesis project recently funded by an ARC DP Grant, with our research partners at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Johns Hopkins University (USA), McGill University (Canada) and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (Germany). We will be advertising shortly for a new postdoc position, keep your eyes peeled. This is a really exciting project contributing to one of the most important questions in modern neuroscience: can the human brain birth new brain cells in adulthood?
We have also recommenced our trauma and refugee clinical project, in collaboration with Dr Shakeh Momartin at STARTTS and co-led with my UOW colleague Prof Sibylle Schwab. This project was put on ice during the pandemic lockdowns, so we are particularly excited to have the opportunity to kick it off again. You can read our publication on the refugee mental health here.
No doubt we will have some exciting updates throughout the year, which I always share in this space; we enjoy sharing what we are up to in the lab with others who would not normally have the opportunity to see it 😊
