Biomedical Sciences

The Alison Douglas PhD Dissertation Prize

The annual Alison Douglas PhD Dissertation prize was established in 2015 in memory of our colleague Professor Alison Douglas.

Professor Alison Douglas was a passionate and supportive mentor to numerous postgraduate students and played a central role in developing Athena Swan within Biomedical Sciences.

All Biomedical Sciences PhD students who complete between July 1st and 30th June are automatically included for consideration. The winner receives an award of £500.

2020

'Somato-dendritic coupling in layer 5 pyramidal neurons of the mouse primary visual cortex'

Dr Valerio Francioni

Rochefort Lab

Previous winners:

2019

'Mechanisms of kidney vascularisation and the roles of macrophages in renal organogenesis'

Dr David Munro

Ribchester lab

Dr Munro also published six first-author papers and was also awarded the Beddington Medal for his PhD work from the British Society for Developmental Biology

 

2018

'Understanding the role of UBA1 in the pathogenesis of spinal muscular atrophy’ 

Dr Hannah Shorrock

Gillingwater lab

 

The runner up prize was awarded to Dr Katherine Bonnycastle, Cousin Lab, for her thesis ‘Synaptic Vesicle Recycling in Preclinical Models of Intellectual Disability, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Epilepsy’.

 

2016 (joint winners)

‘Targeting the Ubiquitin Proteasome System to Develop Novel Therapeutic Approaches for Spinal Muscular Atrophy’,

Dr Rachael Powis

Gillingwater Lab

and

‘Modelling microcircuits of grid cells and theta-nested gamma oscillations in the medial entorhinal cortex’.

Dr Lukas Solanka

Nolan/von Rossum Labs 

 

2015

“Input-Output transformations in the awake mouse brain using whole-cell recordings and probabilistic analysis”.

Dr Paolo Puggini 

Duguid/von Rossum labs