Congratulations to both Vibe G. Frøkjær and Søren Vinther Larsen for each receiving a grant from Læge Sofus Carl Emil Friis og hustru Olga Doris Friis Legat.
Vibe has received 1.210.000 DKK in support for her project "Promoting women's mental health by identifying markers of hormone-sensitive depression?", while Søren has received 500.000 DKK in support for his project "Hormonal sensitivity and brain biology: Do oral contraceptives distort serotonergic brain signaling?"
About Vibe's project:
In this project, we will leverage novel data from a set of existing cohorts to identify common epigenetic signatures among women undergoing two different types of hormonal shifts (pregnancy to post- partum, starting a hormonal contraceptive) and with different risk factors (e.g. absence/presence of early life trauma) and evaluate whether these signatures map onto a spectrum of depressive-like symptoms or not. This will allow us for the first time to develop a molecular biomarker of hormone sensitive depression and to provide a clinical tool to promote women’s mental health.
About Søren's project:
The primary aims are to determine:
1. If use of oral contraceptives (OCs) distorts serotonergic brain function in terms of serotonin 4 receptor (5-HT4R) binding in healthy young women measured with Positron Emission Tomography (PET).
2. If so, we will evaluate what mechanism may underlie this, i.e., is it direct effects of the synthetic steroids or indirect effects of the change in endogenous hormone production due to the synthetic steroids.
The secondary aims are to determine:
3. If OC-induced 5-HT4R changes map onto the emergence of (sub)clinical depressive symptoms including sexual dysfunctions and changes in behavioral-, emotional- and cognitive processes.
4. If OC use affects brain activation during reward-related behavior.
5. If OC use affects brain structure in terms of regional changes in gray matter volumes.
6. If OC use affects resting state network connectivity measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
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Here in the sweet Christmas time, some NRU researchers have had a wonderful visit by Santa.
Vibe G. Frøkjær has received 164.000 DKK in a scholarship from Danish Psychiatric Society (DPS) for scholarstudent Parmida Rezai and her project 'The role of sex hormones on serotonergic brain markers: a molecular brain imaging study in natural cycling healthy women'. Also, Vibe has received 120.000 DKK from RH for medical student Sofie Hvitved who will work part-time on the project 'The impact of hormonal contraceptive use on hippocampal volume'.
Anjali Sankar and Søren Vinther Larsen has each received a grant from Ivan Nielsens Fond for personer med specielle sindslidelser. Anjali's grant is worth 50.000 DKK and is for the project 'Major depression', while Søren's grant is worth 30.000 DKK and is for the project 'Hormonal sensitivity and brain biology: Do oral contraceptives distort serotonergic brain signaling?'.
Furthermore, Martin Balslev Jørgensen has received 164.000 DKK in a scholarship from Danish Psychiatric Society (DPS) for scholarstudent Ása Maria Debes Michelsen and her project 'Neuroticism and Affective Bias in Health', which she will work on with Vibeke Naja Høyrup Dam and Kristian Reveles Jensen, while on the BrainDrugs-Depression project.
And last but not least, Patrick Fisher has received 70.000 DKK in a scholarstipend from RH for scholarstudent Line Wiberg and her project 'Persistent psilocybin-induced changes in personality and brain serotonin 2A receptor levels'.
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Congratulations to Vibe G. Frøkjær and Annika Læbo Rasmussen for receiving from Mental Health Services, Capital Region of Denmark a PhD stipend (worth 2,176,716 DKK) for the 3-year project 'Optimizing antidepressant treatment for women on the pill: From mechanism to precision psychiatry', which will be Annika's PhD project.
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Congratulations to Malthe T. Andersen for receiving from RH a one-year introductory stipend for his project 'Cognitive Heterogeneity in First-Episode Depression'.
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The NRU Christmas Symposium 2024 will take place Friday Nov 29th from 9:00 to 15:30 in the RH Auditorium 2. The program is available here.
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We are immensely proud to announce that three research projects with NRU involvement have recently been supported by large grants from Independent Research Fund Denmark | Medical Sciences (FSS). The three grants total more than 11 million DKK. Congratulations to Professor Vibe Frøkjær, senior researcher Sofi da Cunha-Bang and Professor Martin Balslev Jørgensen.
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We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Vibe G. Frøkjær has been awarded a Lundbeck Foundation Ascending Investigator grant worth 5.911.743 DKK. This prestigious grant is for the proposed 4-year project 'Clinical translation of serotonin 4 receptor agonism: an antidepressant and pro-cognitive target' which is summarized below.
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NRU will take part in the new Center for Discoveries in Migraine (CDM), which is a new Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation and headed by NRU collaborator Prof. Messoud Ashina.
CDM aims to answer the overarching research question: “What neurobiological mechanisms initiate and terminate migraine attacks?”, and we look forward to contributing to finding the answers.
We congratulate Messoud on this fantastic grant.
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We are immensely proud to announce that NRU PhD-student Drummond McCulloch has been awarded the Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize 2024.
With this prize, The Lundbeck Foundation seeks to celebrate talented young scientists who are dedicated and passionate about research. The prize is DKK 300.000, and the amount is split between a personal prize of DKK 100.00 and DKK 200.000 for research activities.
Read more here at the Lundbeck Foundation website: https://lundbeckfonden.com/nyheder/prestigefulde-priser-til-seks-yngre-forskere/han-skanner-hjerner-paa-psykedeliske-stoffer
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It is with great pleasure that we can announce that our collaborator Prof. Russell Poldrack, Department of Psychology & Head of the Center for Open and Reproducible Science, Stanford University, United States has been awarded Rigshospitalet's International KFJ Award 2024.
We have for several years collaborated with Russ through our joint program OpenNeuroPET and with NRU scientists Melanie Ganz-Benjaminsen and Cyril Pernet spearheading this. Moreover, former NRU PhD student, Martin Nørgaard, who was a postdoc in Russ’ laboratory at Stanford and is now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NRU/DIKU also serves as a link and we have ten joint publications emerging from this exciting collaboration.
Russ Poldrack is a cognitive neuroscientist and data scientist, with 249 registered publications on PubMed, an exponential growth of per-year citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 138. His group has made important contributions to the basic understanding of how decision making and executive control are implemented in the human brain. He is also one of the world’s leading experts in data sharing and open science within biomedical research, and has developed a number of widely used open-source tools for data analysis and sharing. In addition, Poldrack has exceptional personal, managerial and collaborative skills. For several decades, Poldrack has been one of the most engaging, influential, and productive individuals within the field of brain imaging and data science, and his group at Stanford University is internationally recognized as one of the best groups within functional brain imaging that addresses the “reproducibility crisis” in science by advocating for good research practices such as data sharing, reproducible data analysis and open science. His group has been at the forefront of developing standards for the organization and sharing of large datasets that can facilitate mega-analyses across research centers and hospitals, ensuring robust and generalizable scientific findings. He has authored a widely used Handbook for fMRI Data Analysis, and three books for broad audiences, including “The New Mind Readers” that explains the power and limitations of neuroimaging for non-experts. Poldrack has also worked to bring good research practices to scientists more broadly. He founded the Center for Open and Reproducible Science at Stanford (CORES) within the Stanford Data Science Center, whose mission is to develop and nurture transparency and reproducibility in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data across all domains of scientific activity. He has also written a widely-used introductory statistics book (“Statistical Thinking”) that includes an entire chapter on doing reproducible research.
RH-News about the award: https://www.rigshospitalet.dk/english/news-and-media/news/Pages/2024/November/pioneer-in-open-science-receives-prestigious-danish-award.aspx
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- Travel grant from 'Jordemoderforeningen'
- Grants from Ivan Nielsens Fond for personer med specielle sindslidelser
- Another scholarstipend from Danish Society of Psychiatry
- New ECNP Network on Psychedelics
- Lundbeck Foundation Investigators Network starting grant
- New scholarstipend from Danish Society of Psychiatry
- Travel support from the Lundbeck Foundation
- Postdoctoral fellowship in the BRIDGE – Translational Excellence Programme
- 1-year introduction stipend from RH to Martin Prener
- AFSP early career award to Anjali Sankar