| Where | Waterstones Bookshop Sauchiehall Street Glasgow |
| When | First Monday of the month, 7pm |
| Contact | Mandy Maclean, Kevin O’Dell, Martin Hendry |
| Website | Glasgow Cafe Scientifique |
Upcoming events
Monday 7th October 2019
Unravelling the clinical variation of motor neurone disease
Liz Elliott
Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative condition, although the course of the disease is highly variable and difficult to predict: an exceptional example, Professor Stephen Hawking, survived for more than 50 years with the condition. Such clinical variation and a limited understanding of the disease’s basis presents a major challenge to the development and testing of urgently-needed targeted treatments.
Liz Elliott is studying for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, looking at the pathology of MND to investigate differences between disease subgroups at a cellular level and gain understanding in to the underlying disease causative mechanisms.
During her medical training Dr Liz Elliott developed a particular interest in muscle wasting conditions and translational medicine, completing an undergraduate degree in Clinical Genetics at King’s College London before working as a researcher in neuromuscular diseases at the John Walton Muscular Dystrophy Research Centre, Newcastle and the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, Edinburgh.
Monday 4th November 2019
Social robots
Emily Cross
Understanding how humans perceive and interact with others is a core challenge of social cognition research. This challenge is poised to intensify in importance as the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and the presence of humanoid robots in society spreads. The research undertaken by Emily and her group applies established theories and methods from psychology and neuroscience to questions concerning how people perceive, interact and form relationships with robots.
Emily will review recent evidence from behavioural and brain imaging studies that aims to provide deeper insights into the relationship between social cognition and brain function. Work comparing social perception of humans and robots highlights the importance of examining how perception of and interaction with artificial agents in a social world might reveal fundamental insights about human social cognition.
Emily Cross is Professor of Social Robotics at the University of Glasgow.
Monday 2nd December 2019
Heart attack in a dish: using human heart muscle made from stem cells to develop better drugs for cardiac repair
Michael Schneider
Heart disease remains the foremost killer of men and women, despite decades of progress including the reduction of risk factors and the development of clot-busting drugs and stents. Most experimental drugs aimed at protecting the heart fail at the stage of testing on human subjects. Human heart muscle now can be grown in the laboratory from “all-purpose” stem cells, providing formerly impossible access to human cardiac biology as a revolutionary platform for drug discovery.
Michael Schneider holds the Simon Marks Chair in Cardiology at Imperial College London. He has received many prestigious awards, including a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant and the 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Heart Association Council on Basic Cardiovascular Sciences. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Academy of Medical Sciences, the American Heart Association, the European Society of Cardiology and the International Society for Heart Research.