FENS has invited four distinguished speakers with extensive expertise in their respective fields.

Moderator – Anna R. Carta

Anna R. Carta is a full Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Prof. Carta is currently vice-coordinator of the international PhD program in Neuroscience and a member of the School Board of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Cagliari (IT). During her career, she has engaged in several international collaborations and her research has been supported by national and international research programmes, including the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. She has been involved in the organisation of national and international neuroscience meetings and has chaired several scientific symposiums. The field of Prof. Carta’s research is Parkinson’s disease, with a focus on neuroinflammation and glial role related to motor and non-motor symptoms, with the final objective of understanding whether harnessing glial function can be exploited to arrest the neuropathology. To address this goal, Prof. Carta’s group is engaged in preclinical testing and repurposing of drugs with immunomodulatory properties as disease-modifying and anti-dyskinetic treatment for PD.

Speaker – Gabriela Constantin

Gabriela Constantin is a Professor of General Pathology and Immunology and Head of the Laboratory of Neuroimmunology and Neuroinflammation at the University of Verona, Italy. Dr Constantin received her medical degree and completed her residency in Neurology at the University of Milan, Italy. She obtained a PhD in molecular and cellular pathology and she is currently the Director of the PhD programme in Inflammation, Immunity and Cancer at the University of Verona. Gabriela Constantin is an internationally recognised leader in neuroimmunology and her studies are focused on the role of leukocyte trafficking in brain inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases.  She contributed to the identification of novel fundamental mechanisms in multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Dr Constantin’s group is also interested in systems biology and AI approaches for the study of biological networks controlling leukocyte activation, inflammation and neurodegeneration.

Speaker – Britta Engelhardt

Since 2003, Britta Engelhardt has been a Professor of Immunobiology and the Director of the Theodor Kocher Institute at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Britta Engelhardt is a renowned expert in brain barriers research.  Her work is dedicated to understanding the role of the brain barriers in maintaining central nervous system (CNS) immune privilege.  Using advanced in vitro and in vivo live cell imaging approaches, her laboratory has significantly contributed to the current understanding of the anatomical routes and molecular mechanisms used by immune cells to enter the CNS during immune surveillance and neuroinflammation in the context of multiple sclerosis and ischemic stroke. She has published over 200 manuscripts that are highly cited. She is an opinion leader in the field, as shown by her regular presentations as invited and keynote speaker at international meetings.

Speaker – Jonathan Kipnis

Dr Jonathan (Jony) Kipnis is a BJC Investigator, Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Immunology and Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Neurosurgery at Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine. He is also the inaugural Director of the Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG) at Washington University. Kipnis lab focuses on complex interactions between the immune and the central nervous systems (CNS). The goal is to elucidate the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying these interactions in neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental and mental disorders, as well as in physiology (including healthy aging). They showed that the brain function is dependent, in part, on the function and integrity of the immune system and that immune molecules (cytokines) can play neuromodulatory roles. The fascination with immunity and its role in neurophysiology is what brought the lab to a breakthrough discovery of meningeal lymphatic vessels that drain the CNS into the peripheral lymph nodes and thus serve as a physical connection between the brain and the immune system. This finding challenged the prevailing mechanisms underlying CNS “immune privilege” and opened new avenues to mechanistically study the nature of neuroimmune interactions under physiological and pathological conditions. The implications of this work are broad and range from Autism to Alzheimer’s disease through neuroinflammatory conditions, such as multiple sclerosis. Recently, Kipnis lab has also identified the skull and vertebrae bone marrow niches as local immune reservoirs for the brain and the spinal cord, whose role in neurological disorders is yet unknown.