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Supporting postgraduates is a key part of the Euan MacDonald Centre’s mission. We are passionate about encouraging, equipping and helping the MND researchers of the future.
One of the key ways we do this is by offering bursaries for conference attendance to enable early-career researchers to present their work.
Today marks the first day of the MND Association International Symposium on ALS/MND, which this year is being held in San Diego, USA. The International Symposium is the biggest annual gathering worldwide of MND researchers, clinicians, and people affected by the condition.
Stella Taso, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh, has received a Euan MacDonald Centre bursary to attend this conference. We asked Stella how funding for conferences has helped her career:
"The Euan MacDonald Centre has played a crucial role in my career progress. It's so important for early-career researchers such as myself to present our own research to an audience of experts and people with lived experience of MND, as well as to hear about research going on in other groups. It sparks new ideas and turns us into better scientists, as well as driving forward the research by uniting our efforts nationally and internationally.
Last year, the Euan MacDonald Centre's support enabled me to attend, and give my first international talk at the MNDA International Symposium on ALS/MND in Montreal. Attending had a genuinely transformative impact and I was honoured to be nominated for the Biomedical Poster Prize at the Symposium. It was fantastic to meet so many key players in the field, and to be first to hear about the latest research advances. It really helped to put my own work in context and gave me some great ideas for my PhD.
That experience opened doors: at the MND conference last year, the Euan MacDonald Centre and my supervisor Prof Jenna Gregory were instrumental in enabling me to undertake an enriching visiting scientist position at QurAlis, a biotech company in Boston, MA, USA, with current clinical trials for MND. In addition, during the conferences I attended last year, I also met the principal investigators from the Keuss/Fratta labs at University College London (UCL), which led to me securing a postdoc position with them at UCL. I was also subsequently selected to give a talk and present three lectures at the European Network to Cure ALS (ENCALS) meeting this summer.
Attending these conferences would not have been possible without the generosity of Euan MacDonald Centre donors and fundraisers, so a heartfelt thank you from me!”
Our sincere thanks to all our donors and fundraisers for supporting the Euan MacDonald Centre.
Fundraising directly enables the Euan MacDonald Centre to invest in supporting early-career researchers. These donations help young researchers to launch new ideas, gain vital experience, and build the foundations for future breakthroughs in MND research.
More information
Find out how you can support the Euan MacDonald Centre: Support Us
Prof Jenna Gregory profile
MND Association ALS symposium (external website)
European Network to Cure ALS (external website)
Image by kind permission of Stella Taso