Dr Tamara Boto wins Wellcome Career Development Award 2023
Posted on: 19 July 2023
Assistant Professor in Physiology, Trinity College Institute for Neuroscience, Dr Tamara Boto studies how features of importance, or salience, are processed in the brain, and how they affect memories, in health and disease.
* Research poses the question: How does the brain know what is important?
Dr Tamara Boto from the Trinity College Dublin Department of Physiology and the Institute of Neuroscience has won a prestigious Wellcome Career Development Award valued at €1.8m.
The funding is for a project running for eight years from September 2023, entitled “Neural substrates of salience: Implications in perception and cognition”.
Trinity’s Dean of Research Prof. Sinéad Ryan said: “This is an important award that acknowledges and backs the potential of mid-career scientists like Tamara to develop into international research leaders. It will allow her to pursue research that is truly impactful. Understanding how the brain determines what is important is not only one of the most fascinating questions in neuroscience, but also imperative for the wellbeing of patients.“
Assistant Professor in Physiology, Trinity College Institute for Neuroscience, Dr Tamara Boto studies how features of importance, or salience, are processed in the brain, and how they affect memories, in health and disease.
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The research uses the fruitfly as a model, with the idea that understanding these incredibly complicated processes in simpler brains, like a fly’s brain, will set the basis for understanding our extremely intricated brains as humans.
The findings of how “importance” is assigned by the neurons in these small brains, and how it changes with experience, will deliver important information and stimulate new research in more complex organisms.
Dr Tamara Boto said: “The support of Wellcome Trust Career Development Award will allow my lab to ask a fundamental question: how the brain decides what is important. Basic research projects like this one are imperative to generate the necessary knowledge to address important health issues. This prestigious award will provide my lab with the means to ultimately contribute to our understanding of how brain works.”
Dr Boto is one of just four researchers on the island of Ireland to have received this award.
For more information, see here .
Media Contact:
Catherine O’Mahony | Media Relations | catherine.omahony@tcd.ie