GOSH BRC Junior Faculty Conference and Training Support Fund - Event Reports 2021

As a current UCL PhD candidate and research fellow at GOSH, I was presenting results from the first part of my study which aimed to evaluate the clinical utility of antroduodenal manometry (ADM) in children suspected paediatric intestinal pseudo-obstruction (PIPO). The study entitled “Correlation Between Antroduodenal Manometry and Histopathology in Paediatric Intestinal Pseudo-obstruction”

In my talk entitled ‘Paediatric epilepsy surgery at a single specialist centre: What has changed over the past two decades?’, I presented the largest single centre cohort of paediatric epilepsy surgery patients to date. I also described how patient characteristics and surgery practices have changed over the past two decades, and examined if outcomes have improved.

I presented my work on the finite element modelling of posterior vault expansion in syndromic patients in an 8-minute pre-recorded oral presentation (A finite element modelling framework to predict spring assisted posterior vault expansion outcomes).

I attended the OHBM 2021 annual meeting and presented a poster called “MELD project: Quantitative analysis of associations between MRI features and FCD histopathologies”.

It was great to be able to share our work with peers as well as senior colleagues and experts in the field to get feedback, and to be able to see what other people have been working on.

I attended the IEC 2021- 34th International Epilepsy Congress and presented a poster called “MELD project: Quantitative analysis of associations between MRI features and FCD histopathologies”.

I presented part of the results I had obtained during the first two years of my PhD program. The talk was pre-recorded and had a duration of 10 minutes plus 5 final minutes dedicated to live Q&A from the audience. The talk was titled: “Splicing noise is detectable across human tissues and modelling its characteristics is likely to improve the detection of pathogenic splicing within patient-derived samples”.

I presented an e-poster entitled “Gene co-expression network analysis of blood-derived transcriptomic data from Parkinson’s disease patients implicates immune responses in disease progression” (P18.032.B) on Sunday, August 29 (European Human Genetics Virtual Conference 2021 - ESGH 2021). The poster was a 5-slides presentation. I highlighted the main goal of the project, which was to identify molecular signatures of PD progression using PPMI data, and the main conclusions from the preliminary results: (1) gene differentially expressed in PD are significantly enriched for GO terms relating to RNA processes and leukocyte activation; and, (2) modules correlating with disease status contain gene sets significantly enriched for GO/KEGG terms relating to RNA processes and immune response activation.

During ESB 2021 I had chance to attend the presentation of my PhD student (Lara Deliege), my postdoc (Sara Ajami) and a visiting MSc student (Begona Garate Andikoetxea). I had chance to take part to the discussion of their papers and take note of the main criticism of the session chairs and attendants.