About 30% of children with cerebral palsy have congenital hemiplegia, resulting from periventricular white matter injury, which impairs the use of one hand and disrupts bimanual co-ordination. Congenital hemiplegia has a profound effect on each child's life and, thus, is of great importance to the public health. Changes in brain organization (neuroplasticity) often occur following periventricular white matter injury. These changes vary widely depending on the timing, location, and extent of the injury, as well as the functional system involved. Currently, we have limited knowledge of neuroplasticity in children with congenital hemiplegia. As a result, we provide rehabilitation treatment to these children almost blindly based exclusively on behavioral data. In this talk, I will present recent research evidence of my team on understanding neuroplasticity in children with congenital hemiplegia by using a multimodal neuroimaging approach that combines data from structural and functional neuroimaging methods. I will further present preliminary data regarding functional improvements of upper extremities motor and sensory functions as a result of rehabilitation with a robotic system that involves active participation of the child in a video-game setup. Our research is essential for the development of novel or improved neurological rehabilitation strategies for children with congenital hemiplegia.

Among all prevalent diseases with a central neurodegeneration, AMD can be considered the most promising in terms of prevention and early intervention, due to several factors surrounding the neural geometry of the foveal singularity. • Steep gradients of cell density, deployed in a radially symmetric fashion, can be modeled with a difference of Gaussian curves. • These steep gradients give rise to huge, spatially aligned biologic effects, summarized as the Center of Cone Resilience, Surround of Rod Vulnerability. • Widely used clinical imaging technology provides cellular and subcellular level information. • Data are now available at all timelines: clinical, lifespan, evolutionary • Snapshots are available from tissues (histology, analytic chemistry, gene expression) • A viable biogenesis model exists for drusen, the largest population-level intraocular risk factor for progression. • The biogenesis model shares molecular commonality with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, for which there has been decades of public health success. • Animal and cell model systems are emerging to test these ideas.

Lifestyle factors such as sleep, diet, stress, and exercise, profoundly influence cardiovascular health. Seeking to understand how lifestyle affects our biology is important for at least two reasons. First, it can expose a particular lifestyle’s biological impact, which can be leveraged for adopting specific public health policies. Second, such work may identify crucial molecular mechanisms central to how the body adapts to our environments. These insights can then be used to improve our lives. In this talk, I will focus on recent work in the lab exploring how lifestyle factors influence cardiovascular health. I will show how combining tools of neuroscience, hematology, immunology, and vascular biology helps us better understand how the brain shapes leukocytes in response to environmental perturbations. By “connecting the dots” from the brain to the vessel wall, we can begin to elucidate how lifestyle can both maintain and perturb salutogenesis.

Mental Health problems among youth constitutes an area of significant social, educational, clinical, policy and public health concern. Understanding processes and mechanisms that underlie the development of mental health problems during childhood and adolescence requires theoretical and methodological integration across multiple scientific domains, including developmental science, neuroscience, genetics, education and prevention science. The primary focus of this presentation is to examine the relative role of genetic and family environmental influences on children’s emotional and behavioural development. Specifically, a complementary array of genetically sensitive and longitudinal research designs will be employed to examine the role of early environmental adversity (e.g. inter-parental conflict, negative parenting practices) relative to inherited factors in accounting for individual differences in children’s symptoms of psychopathology (e.g. depression, aggression, ADHD ). Examples of recent applications of this research to the development of evidence-based intervention programmes aimed at reducing psychopathology in the context of high-risk family settings will also be presented.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has rapidly evolved into a pandemic that is threatening public health, economics, and quality of life worldwide. The gold-standard for testing individuals for COVID-19 is using traditional RT-qPCR, which is expensive and can take up to several hours. Expanding surveillance across a global scale will call for new strategies and tests that are inexpensive, require minimal reagents, decrease assay time, and allow for simple point-of-care (POC) monitoring without need of trained personnel and with quick turnaround time. To expand the speed of COVID-19 surveillance, we are working on a point-of-care microfluidic chip to enable significantly faster and easier testing. This is based upon digital drop loop-mediated isothermal amplification that will allow for rapid testing of large populations at a reasonable cost. The device will employ a nucleic-acid based test called reverse transcriptase LAMP (RT- LAMP) that operates at a temperature of 60-65°C. RT-LAMP removes the bottleneck of thermal cycling and high temperatures required by traditional RT-qPCR thermocycling. The simplicity, speed, and sensitivity will enable early treatment and response to infection.