The Neuroscience Ireland Conference is hosted every second year by a higher education institution on the island of Ireland. This years theme ‘Connectivity for Brain Health’ is a play on connecting neuroscience researchers between Ireland and Northern Ireland and the theme of a thriving and currently pertinent area of brain research, ‘brain connectivity’ with the purpose being to explore and understand connectivity as applied to brain development, interventions and health.
Brain connectivity is measured in many ways and can for example, assess the architecture of the brain, a high-potential advance relative to looking at the brain on a region-by-region basis. Functional connectivity measures the synchronicity of activation of regions acting as networks underlying some of our most critical functions including cognition, emotion and movement. Our topics will range in application from Sleep, Trauma, Parkinson’s Disease, Epilepsy, Alzheimer’s Disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). A merging theme will explore the brains repair mechanisms and interventions such as plasticity and brain stimulation and consider the relevance of connectivity from neonatal, childhood and puberty stages of brain development. These themes reinforce brain health as a goal by encompassing discovery for future prevention and interventions for diseases in which connectivity is implicated.
The audience are the advanced, mid- and early-career neuroscientist across the island of Ireland. Conference outcomes will include networking, brain health-related research collaboration development, education and awareness, early-career researcher mentorship and awards, and engagement of the neuroscience research community as a network (a key goal of Neuroscience Ireland). Finally, the all-island connectivity theme is something we aim to revive through this conference bringing researchers from all the higher education institutions across Ireland together in Belfast, connecting the thriving neuroscience research hubs in the North with those in Ireland and strengthening our network through brain health-related research collaborations.