Dr Joan Kaufman will be the international presenter at the SANS Symposium on 16 September 2017.
Joan Kaufman received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Yale University where she served on faculty in the Department of Psychiatry from 1998-2015. In 2015 she was recruited to Baltimore to serve as Director of Research at the Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress at Kennedy Krieger Institute, with joint faculty appointments in Psychiatry and the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Kaufman is a clinician, child advocate, and researcher whose career has been dedicated to work with maltreated children and their families. Her research uses tools from psychology, genetics, and neuroscience to understand risk and resilience. Last year she published a book, Broken Three Times: A Story of Child Abuse in America, which is a narrative non-fiction story that follows one family through the child welfare system, with each chapter providing launching points for discussing state-of-the-art policy, practice, and scientific updates. The focus of Dr. Kaufman’s work is broad, and spans from neurobiology to social policy.
Plenary: Child Abuse and Epigenetic Mechanisms of Disease Risk.
Parallel: Promoting Resilience in Maltreated Children
Dr Joseph Raimondo will be the local presenter.
Joseph Raimondo, MBChB (Cape Town) MSc (Oxford) DPhil Neuroscience (Oxford), is a neuroscientist who investigates brain function and dysfunction using electrophysiological, optical imaging and computational approaches. His career ambition is to produce outstanding research of both local and global relevance, whilst developing African capacity in cellular neurophysiology and computational neuroscience. The primary aim of his research group is to answer the question: ‘Why do brains seize?’ To do so they examine the cellular and circuit level interactions between brain cells, which result in the development of epileptic seizures. They attempt to utilise a ‘first principles approach’ to make predictions that can be tested experimentally. They have a strong focus on causes of epilepsy relevant to the African context, such as epilepsy secondary to cerebral tape worm infection (neurocysticercosis).
Plenary: GABAergic transmission in epileptic seizures: a goodie turned bad?
Abstract submission has been extended to 30 May 2017 http://www.biopsychsa.co.za/index.php/abstracts-bio/abstract-submission
The annual SANS Symposium and AGM will be held on the 16th September 2017. This year the symposium will be hosted by the Biological Psychiatry Congress at the Lord Charles Hotel in Stellenbosch.
We invite SANS members to present their neuroscience research topics (not only psychiatric research) and to attend the annual SANS AGM to discuss matters related to the progress of the Society. Members are encouraged to nominate promising neuroscientists from southern Africa to be co-opted onto the executive committee. A focus of this year’s AGM will be transformation of the committee.
SANS members can now RSVP for the gala dinner at a reduced price of R250 per person. Contact the conference organizer (sonja@londocor.co.za) in order to do so.
Accommodation at the Lord Charles Hotel
We look forward to seeing old and new SANS members at this beautiful venue to talk neuroscience and discuss how we can move the Society forward.