DAVID TVILDIANI MEDICAL UNIVERSITY

On November 11-15th as representatives of David Tvildiani Medical University's (DTMU) Students and Young Scientists’ Scientific Association (SYSSA) VI year students Mariam Shubitidze and Baba Sai Krishna Ambedkar attended the 47th Neuroscience 2017 in Washington DC, USA.

Neuroscience 2017 is the world's largest conference in neuroscience and is organised annually by the Society for Neuroscience (SFN). This year's 47th conference, held in the Walter E. Convention Center, brought together 30 021 SFN member participants and attendees from 80 countries, including world renowned scientists and professors, postgraduate, PhD, and undergraduate students who presented recent discoveries and researches of their universities, clinics, and labs. The format of the conference included symposia and nanosymposia that consisted of oral presentations regarding various neurological topics; presidential lectures and poster sessions; exhibitions of newest scientific and medical technologies, organizations and institutions from different countries, American universities and their programs. In total, the conference consisted of 13552 presentations, 902 sessions, and exhibitions of 534 companies. Each conference day ended with networking-social events held in the Marriott Marquis and the Renaissance Hotel conference halls that allowed students and scientists to get in touch with professors and researchers in the fields and universities of their interest in a less formal setting and receive valuable information and advice regarding career development and research opportunities. The social events included separate meetings for scientists researching Alzheimer's disease, cognitive neuroscience; posters of faculty for undergraduate neuroscience students; career development networking; Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Iowa, and Illinois Universities; cerebellum, hippocampus, neuroethics, neuropharmacology, vision, neuron-glia interaction, Parkinson's disease, and neurorehabilitation meetings among many others.

One of the participants of the Neuroscience 2017 was a graduate student of DTMU, Dennis Jgamadze MD MSc PhD, now a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Pennsylvania. The topic of his oral presentation was – Transplantation of human cortical organoid tissue for reconstruction of rat visual cortex, and of his poster – Characterization of cerebral organoid activity using two-photon calcium imaging and acute electrophysiology techniques. Posters were also presented by Georgian scientists Tamar Macharadze (MD, TSU, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology) – Loss of early sensory experience alters the dendritic morphology of supragranular pyramidal neurons in primary sensory cortices, and Merab Tsagareli (PhD, Ivane Beritashvili Experimental Biomedicine Center) among others with the topic – NSAIDs attenuate TRPA1 and TRPV1 channels activated by their agonists.

The four presidential lectures that were held on each day had been chosen by the president of SFN Eric Nestler and covered new researches in neurobiology of language by Erich D. Jarvis (professor and head of the Rockfeller University neurogenetics lab), illuminating neurobiology at the nanoscale and systems scale by imaging by Xiaowei Zhuang (Harvard University), GUT microbiotia and child undernutrition by Jeffrey Gordon (Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St.Louis), and genetic complexity of schizophrenia by Pamelar Sklar (Icahn School of medicine at Mount Sinai).

As the main purpose of the DTMU students' attendance, Mariam and Baba met with the representatives of organizations involved in international projects in neuroscience who informed the DTMU students of international programs and projects, activities and vacancies that will be useful for DTMU and its students of all levels; representatives of publishing presses of universities such as Harvard, Princeton, MIT and scientific journals who will give the DTMU students access to scientific journals and discounts on scientific/medical books; University of Iowa and University of Delaware were particularly interested in DTMU, among other universities.