City of Sydney Talks and NeuralKnitworks

Get hooked on brain science and knitting!
Meet and hear from 4 neuroscientists, while raising your knitting needles to create something unique with Neural Knitworks.
Our researchers will be talking about brain health across your lifespan covering autism, anxiety, epilepsy and sleep while Neural Knitworks will help you stitch a neuron from scratch.
Meet the Researchers from the Brain and Mind Centre
Dr Stela Petkova is a Senior Research Scientist in the Translational Psychopharmacology team at the Brain and Mind Centre. In her current work, Stela focuses on drug development for social dysfunction including social communication deficits, social anxiety disorder and autism spectrum disorder using mouse and rat models.
Dr Nathan Cross is a researcher at the University of Sydney where he investigates how our sleep changes as we age. He is interested in how sleep works to help us remember things, measuring how different parts of our brain communicate while we sleep to save (remember) or delete (forget) information from our day.
Dr Vivian Liao is a research-focused academic at the Ion Channel Drug Discovery Lab within the Brain and mind Centre. Currently, she is creating brain organoid models to study severe, untreatable epilepsy. Through this research, she aims to better understand the disease and find potential treatments for these patients.
Dr Anastasia Suraev is a senior researcher in the Healthy Brain Ageing Program at the Brain and Mind Centre. Her research uses brain imaging techniques to examine the build-up of certain proteins in the brain and how the degree of protein build-up relates to key clinical features, such as memory and thinking skills, and dementia risk factors, including sleep disturbance.