Global Cambridge Singapore
Global Cambridge Singapore
Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and our distinguished panel debated the future of children’s healthcare. How can we treat the mind and body to not only diagnose, but prevent ill health? And how does a global approach to research collaboration benefit us all?
Professor Ferguson-Smith was joined by Professor David Rowitch (Clare 1984), Head of Paediatrics at Cambridge; Professor Victoria Leong (Christ’s 1998), Associate Professor of Psychology and Medicine at Nanyang Technological University, Senior Honorary Fellow at the Department of Paediatrics at Cambridge, and Deputy Director of the Cambridge-NTU Centre for Lifelong Individualised Learning; and Professor Paul MacAry, Associate Professor and the Director of Life Sciences Institute Immunology Programme at National University of Singapore, in a lively and wide-ranging discussion across developmental neuroscience, flexible learning across the lifespan, and what this could mean for children’s development and neural health.
Speakers
Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith FRS FMedSci
Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and International Partnerships at the University of Cambridge. She is the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics, President of the Genetics Society and a member of the UKRI BBSRC Council. She is a Fellow of Darwin College.
Professor Ferguson-Smith is a mammalian developmental geneticist and epigeneticist. Her team studies the epigenetic control of genome function with particular emphasis on epigenetic inheritance and she is an expert on genomic imprinting. Her research group is made up of both experimental and computational scientists and her work takes interdisciplinary approaches to consider stem cells and the epigenetic programme, functional genomics and epigenomics, and the interaction between the environment and the genome in health and disease within and across generations. From 2008-2011 she was A*STAR Director of Research at the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences.
She was elected to EMBO in 2006, to the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the Society of Biology in 2012, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2017. She has received several awards; most recently in 2021 she was recipient of the Royal Society's Buchanan Medal and the Society for Reproduction and Fertility's Anne McLaren Distinguished Scientist Award.
Professor David Rowitch (Clare 1984)
David Rowitch is a pediatrician (neonatology) and developmental neuroscientist. He is Professor and Head of Department of Paediatrics at the University of Cambridge (UK), and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at University of California San Francisco. He obtained his MD from University of California Los Angeles and PhD (biochemistry) from the University of Cambridge.
Professor Rowitch’s laboratory in the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute investigates genetic factors that determine development and diversity of glia, which comprise 90% of cells in the human brain. He has applied principles of developmental neuroscience to better understand human neonatal brain development as well as white matter injury in premature infants, multiple sclerosis and leukodystrophy.
As a physician-scientist, Professor Rowitch’s interest focuses on functional genomic technologies to better diagnose and treat rare neurogenetic disorders in children. He is academic lead for the new Cambridge Children’s Hospital, researching origins of paediatric physical and mental conditions and preventive interventions within the UK National Health Service.
His research in the field of developmental neurobiology and biomedicine has earned him numerous awards, including election as Fellow of the Academy Medical Sciences (UK) in 2018 and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021.
Associate Professor Victoria Leong (Christ's 1998)
Victoria Leong is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who has pioneered the use of dyadic-EEG to study parent-infant neural synchrony during naturalistic social interactions.
Vicky is Associate Professor of Psychology and Medicine at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Senior Honorary Fellow at the Department of Pediatrics, Cambridge University (UK), and Deputy Director of the Cambridge-NTU Centre for Lifelong Individualised Learning which aims to develop neuropersonalised training programes for flexible learning across the lifespan.
Vicky is a recipient of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Early Career Impact Award (2022), Nayang Research Award (2022), MOE Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship (Singapore, 2021), Parke Davis Exchange Fellowship (Harvard, 2015), Sutasoma Junior Research Fellowship (Cambridge, 2013-15) and the Cognitive Science Society Glushko Dissertation Prize (2014). She holds research awards worth over SGD$10 mil (~GBP£6 mil) from A*STAR, the Singapore Ministry of Education, the National Research Foundation of Singapore, the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy, the UK Economic & Social Research Council, and the Rosetrees Medical Trust.
Associate Professor Paul MacAry
Paul MacAry received his BSc (Hons) in Molecular Genetics from the Glasgow University in 1993 and his PhD in Immunology from GKT, University of London in 1998. He performed post-doctoral research in the Cambridge University Institute for Medical Research (CIMR) and since 2005 has been an independent investigator in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The multi-disciplinary research in his laboratory covers the entire spectrum of scientific endeavour, from basic research to industrial applications with an emphasis on antibody biology, immune repertoire mapping and protein engineering.
His laboratory has ongoing collaborations with Roche Pharma, GlaxoSmithKline, Chugai, and Becton Dickinson. Paul was a founding member and Meetings Secretary for the Singaporean Society of Immunology (SSI)-Singapore’s first international learned society and the founding scientist for two biotechnology companies, BSCR LTD founded in Cambridge in 2004 and Antibody Cradle LTD founded in Singapore in 2012. His research has been featured in covering articles on the BBC and Reuters and he has published several manuscripts in top international journals including Science, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Medicine, Immunity, Hepatology, PNAS and Blood with four included in the staff of 1000.
Booking information
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Registration will close on Saturday, 20 May at 11.30am Singapore time
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