Photo of the week: Drs Akram Zamani and Evelyn Tsantikos win seed grant funding!

Congratulations to Dr Akram Zamani (left) and Dr Evelyn Tsantikos (right), who are recipients of the AMREP 2018 Collaborative Seed grant award for their research project, "A new player in microglial activation driving inflammation and pathology in traumatic brain injury [TBI]."

TBI is a complex and poorly-understood pathology with long-term consequences, affecting the lives of children and young people well into adulthood. Identifying disease pathways that can provide scope for improved treatments is of utmost necessity and importance. This study will focus on how microglia - cells which provide the first and main form of active immune defence - act in the normal brain, and the researchers will then examine howthese cells respond to a brain injury.

Dr Zamani is a Postdoctoral Research fellow in Dr Bridgette Semple's Pediatric Neurotrauma Group, Department of Neuroscience; and Dr Tsantikos is a Research Officer in Associate Professor Margaret Hibb's Leukocyte Signalling Laboratory, which studies signalling pathways that play a role in immune system development, function and disease. Find out more about the AMREP collaborative seed grants: www.monash.edu/medicine/ccs/research/emcr/seed-grants