News & Events
UNSW young investigator awarded for kidney disease research
UNSW PhD student Dr Adeniyi Borire has been recognised for a manuscript on the effects of haemodialysis on intraneural blood flow in end-stage kidney disease.
Dr Borire has won the American Association of Neuromuscular and Electrodiagnostic Medicine (AANEM) 2017 Golseth Young Investigator Award.
His research with PhD supervisors Professors Arun Krishnan and Matthew Kiernan and Dr Neil Simon and other co-authors was judged on scientific merit, methodology, manuscript form and Dr Borire’s contributions to the project.
High school students buzzing about neuroscience
Q: Which part of a neuron is specialised for receiving inputs from other neurons?*
This was one of the questions put to 80 year 10 students who visited UNSW Sydney last week for the Australian Brain Bee Challenge (ABBC) NSW finals.
The competition promotes the learning of scientific research to high school students and provides an introduction to university education and careers in neuroscience.
The winner was Wenjing Chen of James Ruse Agricultural High School, and the school also took out the team prize.
Inaugural Franklin Women mentoring program kicks off
The inaugural Franklin Women mentoring program was launched in June with 12 institutes and 54 mentor-mentee pairs coming together to commence a 6-month structured program.
Different genetic features found in Chinese dementia cohort
Genetic screening of Chinese patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) indicates that different genetic constitution in different populations could cause the same disease.
FTD is a progressive, degenerative brain disease. It primarily affects individuals younger than 65 years old.
UNSW Conjoint Associate Professor Yue Huang and researchers from four Shanghai-based institutions tested the four most common FTD causative genes in Chinese patients.
An extra organ or body part is more common than you think
OPINION: Doctors thought they were operating on a malignant tumour when they set about removing an unusual oval lump on the right side of a 40-year-old woman’s body. What they recovered instead was a perfectly normal and fully functioning extra spleen.
Most of us only have one spleen, an organ involved in immune function and blood filtering. But accessory or extra spleens are quite common, appearing in more than one in ten people.
Kids’ vitamin gummies: unhealthy, poorly regulated and exploitative
OPINION: There are many brands of kids’ “gummies” on the market. They are promoted as deliciously flavoured and a great way for growing bodies (and fussy eaters) to get the nutrients they need. 
Confessions of an overconfident, mediocre man
OPINION: I can't really put my finger on the precise moment I embraced my own male mediocrity. It was more a dawning realisation.
Be it striding confidently onto the stage to deliver a lecture with minimal preparation, having the sheer audacity to think I can pull off live TV or radio, or even sharing my thoughts with you here, its warm embrace is always with me.
In fact, I wear my mediocrity — or at least the confidence that comes with it — like armour. Most blokes do. It's almost a defining male characteristic.
The information in the silence: tapping into the sense of touch
UNSW neuroscientists have discovered a completely new understanding of how the brain deciphers neural inputs, which could transform the next generation of robotic prosthetics.
When our skin scans a surface, everything we feel is conveyed through the nerves by means of electrical impulses, received by neurons in the brain in signals like Morse code.
Neurophysiologists Ingvars Birznieks and Richard Vickery research the sense of touch, and how we can take so much information – like pressure, shape, texture, and vibration – from one signal.
Membrane charge sensor to watch the regulation of our T cells
UNSW researchers with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging have built a sensor to measure the membrane charge of our T cells.
T cells are the “brain” of our immune system, so understanding how they sense and respond to antigen is extremely important.
Until now we did not know how antigen binding to the T cell receptor triggers an intracellular activation response, or why the receptor does not signal when it is not bound to antigens.
Why brain stimulation isn’t what it’s cracked up to be
OPINION: Interest in electrical brain stimulation has skyrocketed in recent years, both in the popular media and scientific literature.