On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Kristen Brennand is a stem cell biologist working to bridge the fields of developmental neuroscience and psychiatry. A major focus of her work is developing in vitro models for schizophrenia (SZ) in order to identify novel insights into the molecular and cellular phenotypes of mental illness. SZ is believed to result from abnormal neurodevelopmental processes that begin years before the onset of symptoms. She previously reprogrammed fibroblasts from SZ patients into human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) and subsequently differentiated these disorder-specific hiPSCs into neural progenitor cells (NPCs) and neurons. She and others have found that SZ hiPSC NPCs show evidence of aberrant migration, increased oxidative stress, perturbed responses to environmental stressors, while SZ hiPSC neurons exhibit decreased neurite number reduced synaptic maturation and reduced synaptic activity.
