Meeting of the minds: Visiting international neurotrauma award fosters female ECRs

L-R: Ms Tabitha Green and Assistant Professor Rachel Rowe
accepting their award

by Associate Professor Bridgette Semple

Ms Tabitha Green from the University of Colorado Boulder has been awarded the competitive WiNTR-VISA Award (Women in Neurotrauma Research - Visiting International Scholar Award), announced last week at the US National Neurotrauma Society's annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ms Green will use this opportunity to visit with A/Prof. Bridgette Semple's Paediatric Neurotrauma research group in the Department of Neuroscience, Central Clinical School at Monash University. The visit period of two weeks will be late November-early December 2022.

Ms Green is currently a graduate student working with Assistant Professor Rachel Rowe in the Sleep and Inflammation Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder, where her PhD work has focused on understanding how traumatic brain injury results in sleep disruption, and the role of brain microglia in this process.

L-R: A/Prof Bridgette Semple, Ms Tabitha Green and
A/Prof Rachel Rowe

This award aims to promote international gender equality in neurotrauma research by enabling international networking opportunities, and to advance the early careers of female researchers working in the neurotrauma field. The award will subsidise Ms Green's travel to Melbourne for a two-week period of research training and collaboration in A/Prof Semple's laboratory.

During this time, Ms Green will share her expertise in advanced methodologies to quantify changes in microglial cell morphology after injury; and take advantage of her visit to learn new skills in neurobehavioural assessments in rodents and video-EEG analysis.