Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the Brain Sciences 2020 Young Investigator Award are Professor Rickie Patani, Dr. Olivia Gosseries and Dr. Francesco Bartoli.

Professor Rickie Patani is a physician scientist with over a decade of direct experience working on human induced pluripotent stem cell models of neurodegeneration. Rickie’s lab focuses specifically on the themes of RNA metabolism and cellular autonomy in motor neurone disease (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS).

Dr. Olivia Gosseries is a neuropsychologist, research associate at F.R.S-FNRS and co-director of the Coma Science Group, University of Liège (Belgium). She studies pathological, physiological and pharmacological modifications of consciousness using behavioural assessments and imaging technologies. Her work focuses on diagnosis, prognosis and treatments in patients with disorders of consciousness after recovering from a coma.

Dr. Francesco Bartoli is a General Adult Psychiatrist (since 2018) and Assistant Professor (since July 2020) at the Department of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. He has a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Milano-Bicocca (2012). He has led several research projects in recent years on biomarkers of severe mental disorders, psychopharmacology and the comorbidity between mental and substance use disorders. He has authored 89 studies published in international journals indexed in Scopus, mostly acting as the first author.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee members for their careful evaluation of the many excellent nominations.

Prof. Dr. Stephen D. Meriney
Editor-in-Chief, Brain Sciences