Our CIND ECR Moataz Assem has been awarded the prestigious Wellcome Trust Early Career Award, totalling over £800k for five years, to investigate working memory brain circuits at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge. His research aims to understand how we “actively” focus on limited information while also maintaining a broader "hidden" cognitive background. To this end, he will utilize innovative combinations of advanced techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electrocorticography (ECoG), and precision functional MRI (fMRI), alongside anatomical data from non-human primates. This multimodal approach holds significant implications for circuit-based clinical interventions. Moataz is collaborating with top institutions globally, including Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, the Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute/INSERM in Lyon, and the University of Oxford.
The ECR Funding that CIND awarded to Moataz in 2023 was pivotal to help Dr. Assem collect pilot data to design and support his Wellcome proposal. The whole CIND community is delighted that we have made such an impact on Moataz' career and proud of his success! We wish him all the very best with his career and future projects.