Please see news items below on academic promotions in the department, and updates from the Delogu, Marzi, Al Khleifat, and Thuret lab groups.
We are pleased to announce the academic promotions in the Department. They are as follows:
News from Alessio Delogu
“As the exam chair for the FoLSM UG Neuroscience programme, it is my pleasure to share with the many of you that teach on that programme the excellent results in this year’s National Student Survey (NSS 2026). Programme director Prof Kiecker wishes to relay the congratulations from our executive Dean Prof Hotopf on this excellent result.”
Neuroscience is the UG programme with the highest score increase in FoLSM.
We now have four areas with scores in the 90s:
Learning resources: 94.9 (up by almost 10 points from 85.0 last year)
Teaching on my course: 91.3 (up from 87.7)
Academic support: 90.4 (up by 11 from 79.4)
Freedom of expression: 90.4 (up by >10 from 80.0)
… and six areas in the 80s:
Student voice: 88.8 (up by 10 from 78.8)
Mental wellbeing services: 88.0 (up by almost 10 from 78.4)
Learning opportunities: 87.5 (up from 81.2)
Organisation and management: 87.5 (up by 17.9 from 69.6)
Employability and skills: 86.5 (up by almost 20 from 66.7)
Assessment and feedback: 82.7 (up by 17.6 from 65.1)
Module information: 81.3 (up from 76.0)
Link to the full document https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/nss/
News from Ahmed Al Khleifat
Dr Al Khleifat has received the Department of Neurology Recognition Award, presented by Professor Nathir Obeidat, President of the University of Jordan.
News from Sarah Marzi
Dr Sarah Marzi has been awarded £1.5M in funding from the Dementia Frontiers Fund. Together with Professor Henne Holstege at Amsterdam UMC and Dr Alexi Nott at Imperial College London, team EMERALD (Epigenomic Mechanisms of Extreme Resilience and APOE Liability in Dementia) will study cell type-specific epigenetic mechanisms underlying cognitive resilience in centenarians. Read the full news story here
News from Alexandros Frydas in the Sarah Marzi lab
Alexandros and other members of the lab attended the ENCALS Conference in Madrid during 24-26th of June. Alexandros personally had a poster, entitled: Epigenetic regulation in the ALS brain: identifying novel cell type-specific targets.
“We are investigating H3K27Ac in the ALS brain (motor cortex), compared to healthy individuals. To accomplish that, we employ epigenetic profiling (CUT&TAG) in cell-type specific resolution, by enriching for distinct cell types (including upper motor neurons) using fluorescence-activated nuclei sorting. We aim to pinpoint novel molecular processes leading to disease in a cell type-specific context and functionally dissect genetic variants previously associated with ALS.
The poster shows preliminary results of our sorting strategy to obtain high-purity nuclei for all cell types of interest, and cell-type specific H3K27Ac datasets and quality control showing refined optimization.”
Alexandros also received a travel grant from the Guarantors of Brain for the conference.
A summer of celebrations from the Thuret lab!
July has been an especially exciting month for the lab, with several major milestones to celebrate.
First, Dr Lucia Batzu and Dr Sahand Farmand successfully defended their PhDs on 6 July and 10 July, respectively. Huge congratulations to both of them on this fantastic achievement and on all the hard work that brought them to this point!
In between these two celebrations, our new paper was published in Nature Communications on 7 July. Led by Tinne Nissen, with contributions from additional Thuret Lab members Sahand Farmand, Vikki Houghton, Hyunah Lee and Daniel Rock, the study shows how chronic inflammatory signalling can reprogramme human hippocampal progenitor cells away from neurogenesis and towards an immune-defensive state.
Read how this happens and why it matters here:
➡️ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74104-x
Finally, we ended July on another high: the Thuret Lab received the King’s-wide Freezer Challenge 2026 Small Lab Prize! This was a true team effort, brilliantly led by Gargi Mandal, and recognises the lab’s commitment to more sustainable and efficient research practices. A wonderful month for science, sustainability and new beginnings.
