Neutrino discoveries and academic awards for excellence: News from Imperial

Here’s a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

From academic awards to subatomic particles, here's some quick-read news from across Imperial. 

LEO Foundation Award 

Dr Claire Higgins from the Department of Bioengineering has won the LEO Foundation Award in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa Region (EMEA) region for her impressive academic achievements, as well as the remarkable leadership of her research group and to future generations of skin scientists. The award is worth USD 100,000. 

Dr Higgins’ research aims to achieve scarless wound healing in human skin by studying how human hair follicles can be used as models for skin healing.  

She received the USD 100,000 award in person during the 53rd Annual ESDR Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal on 5 September 2024.  She said: “I am thrilled to receive the LEO Foundation Award. I find my research super exciting, and I love discovering new things about the skin, but receiving this award reinforces the belief that our work is interesting and has the potential to have several impacts on skin health.” 

Dr Higgins leads the ‘Skin Regeneration’ Lab at Imperial. The diverse group contains two postdocs, one research assistant and six PhD students, and their research projects range from diagnostics for scleroderma – which leads to chronic hardening and contraction of skin and in some cases also connective tissue in other parts of the body – to evolution of hair. 

Anne-Marie Engel, Chief Scientific Officer at the LEO Foundation said: “It is a pleasure to present this year’s LEO Foundation Award in Region EMEA to Claire Higgins, a truly well-deserving recipient of the award. Claire Higgins is a distinguished and talented skin scientist. Her substantial impact on skin research extends beyond her research to the colleagues and students whom she works with and trains. Claire Higgins’s clear vision for her future research can help to pave the way for new and exciting discoveries within dermatology, pointing to improve the lives of people living with skin diseases.” 

Neurocritical care  

An Imperial and King’s College London research team has developed a new model that could one day monitor and prevent further brain damage in neurocritical care patients.  

Neurocritical care is a medical discipline that treats conditions affecting the nervous system such as stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI). 

Today, spreading depolarisations (SDs) — waves of brain hyperactivity and inhibition following brain injury which can lead to secondary brain injuries — are detected using invasive methods by directly placing electrodes on scalps, with lengthy analysis times.   

Now, researchers have published a paper in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics as its special issue’s featured article that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) data to potentially slash decision times 24,000-fold from 2 hours to fewer than 0.3 seconds using AI methods to, for the first time, enable real-time monitoring of SD events. 

While the authors stress that this is an early study, with the model tested on two brain injury patients, the model itself was trained and tested on extensive simulated data.   

This is the first time a real-time non-invasive way to monitor SDs has been developed, and could open doors to rapid outpatient triage, potentially helping to transform emergency care by swiftly identifying high-risk patients.   

Lead author Yinzhe Wu, from Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering and I-X, said: “I am incredibly excited by the potential impact on neurocritical care and patient outcomes, which could mark a significant leap forward. I am thrilled to have led this work as my undergraduate project with Professor Martyn Boutelle.”  

Senior author and project supervisor Professor Martyn Boutelle from the Department of Bioengineering said: “This is an exceptional piece of work that builds on our collaboration with King’s College Hospital. It was led by the student independently, featuring a highly novel EEG data processing approach for non-invasive SD monitoring, which seemingly solved a problem that has stumped several international groups in this field. Their critical testing with limited patients sets a template for future clinical evaluation.” 

Co-author Professor Anthony Strong from King’s College London said “This innovation not only could enhance patient care but could also pave the way for new research opportunities. I am interested to see how this technology will be adopted: in the long term it could improve patient outcomes.” 

The research team also included vital work from Dr Sharon Jewell from King’s College London and Dr Guang Yang, Dr Xiaodan Xing and Dr Yang Nan from Imperial. 

New neutrino detector 

A new detector for neutrinos – sub-atomic particles with extremely small mass – has made its first observations, marking a key milestone in the search for new physics. 

The Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the USA was built by an international collaboration of 250 physicists and engineers, including a team led by Professor Soldner-Rembold, who recently became Head of Imperial’s Department of Physics, joining from the University of Manchester. 

Neutrinos change some of their properties while travelling, which may explain some gaps in our understanding of the universe. The SBND measures neutrinos created just 110m away, allowing their initial properties to be compared to results from detectors much further away. 

The physics of these interactions is an important element of future experiments that will use liquid argon to detect neutrinos, such as the long-baseline Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which Imperial physicists are also involved in. 

Main image credit: Credit Dan Svoboda, Fermilab