IBRO Early Career Committee (IBRO-ECC) is composed of scientists in the early stage of their careers, who work as independent principal investigators and have started in their position no longer than 10 years before nomination. Being mostly formed by, but not restricted to, IBRO alumni, the committee aims to strengthen and consolidate IBRO’s alumni community.

The mission of the IBRO-ECC is three-fold:

• Support networking and scientific exchange between the individual IECC members and their scientific networks

• Provide visibility for IBRO among similar career staged scientists through coordinated activities and events of the IECC

• Ensure outreach, engagement and inclusion of ideas and views by the group on behalf of their constituency in IBRO’s decision making and programs.

Members | Mentorship Initiative | NextInNeuro Webinars | Grants | Open Resources | Alba Network 

IBRO-ECC MEMBERS

US/CANADA

Arjun Krishnaswamy
McGill University
Canada

Constantina Theofanopoulu
Rockfeller University
USA

Daniel da Silva
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
USA

The IBRO-ECC is starting a new mentorship initiative to gain writing skills. The initiative will recruit PhD students and early postdocs as part of an international group to write commissioned review articles for IBRO journals. A diverse group of up to 6 trainees will undertake specific writing tasks under the guidance of a mentor.

• Joint first-authorships will be offered for the career development of trainees.
• The group will meet once a month to discuss the progress.
• Turnaround times for review articles will be around 6 months from conception to publication
• Topics could range from cellular, molecular, systems, and computational neuroscience 

More information: please contact Prof. Srikanth Ramaswamy (srikanth.ramaswamy [at] newcastle.ac.uk) or Prof. Harry Steinbusch (h.steinbusch [at] maastrichtuniversity.nl).

Altered microglial function has been shown to contribute to different psychiatric disorders. Regulation of microglial phenotype by immune receptors has become a central topic in many neurological conditions. 

However, despite the importance of immune receptors on microglial function, many of them have not been studied in detail. Our research explored the participation of the CD300f immune receptors, which are expressed in the Central Nervous System by myeloid cells, including microglia and perivascular macrophages, in the control of neuroinflammation, microglial phenotype as well as its involvement in behavioral alterations relevant for major depressive disorder.

Colour vision is based on circuit-level comparison of the signals from spectral distinct types of photoreceptors. In our own eyes, the presence of three types of cones enable trichromatic colour vision. However, many phylogenetically ‘older’ vertebrates have four or more cone types, and in almost all their cases the circuits that enable tetra- or possibly even pentachromatic colour vision are not known. This includes the majority of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and bony fish.

In the lab we study neuronal circuits for colour vision in non-mammalian vertebrates, with a focus on zebrafish, a tetrachromatic surface dwelling species of teleost. I will discuss how in the case of zebrafish, retinal colour computations are implemented in a fundamentally different, and probably much more efficient way compared to how they are thought to work in humans. I will then highlight how these fish circuits might be linked with those in mammals, possibly providing a new way of thinking about how circuits for colour vision are organized in vertebrates.