Hi, Olá and Hola all,

The annual Postgraduate (PG) Symposium of the British and Irish Chapter of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (BIC-ISMRM) will be organized for the first time ever in collaboration with the newly formed Iberian ISMRM Chapter!

After a year in which Brexit and the Pandemic dominated our agendas and threatened our desire to remain linked, isn’t this a Positive Spin around? What happens when a British, an Iberian and an Irish scientist logon to a virtual environment? Well, what a great experiment that would be… Let’s do it! This would be the perfect opportunity for PG students from all over the UK, Spain and Portugal to disseminate their work.

Together with our talented Event Planner Investigators (EPI) Team, our main mission is to ensure everybody gets the most out of the event. If there’s anything that we can learn from previous experiences is that online meetings come with advantages, but with a massive lack of networking opportunities.. which is especially important for early career stages! To address this issue, a new buddy system will be introduced at this year’s meeting and we will give you the opportunity to share a brief introduction of yourself.

This year’s meeting will be held online on April 15th and 16th 2021 in the afternoon. The program includes traditional scientific talks and interactive poster sessions. In addition, we have planned two informal sessions aiming to inspire and support PG students on their future career choices.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the conference, we hope you’ll be happy to (virtually) put yourself out there!

To find more details, check our meeting website here!

Congratulations to the winners of the best oral and poster presentations:

Oral presentations

1st Phoebe Evans Centre for Advanced Medical Imaging, Division of Medicine, UCL, UK Title: Cardiac-rhythm linked perivascular fluid movement reduced in pharmacological model of hypertension

2nd Rita Ferreira Gil Champalimaud Research, Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, Lisbon, PT Title: Dissecting sources of superior colliculus negative BOLD responses in the rat visual pathway

3rd Alix Plumley Brain Research Imaging Centre, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK Title: Motion-resolved B1+ prediction in parallel-transmit using deep neural networks.

Poster presentations

1st Gabriela Belsley Oxford Centre for Clinical Magnetic Resonance Research, Radcliffe Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK Title: Correction of Through Slice B0-Gradient Dephasing Errors in Double Angle Method B1+ and T1 mapping at 3T

2nd Jaime Caballero-Insaurriaga Centre for Integrative Neuroscience A.C. (HM CINAC), Mostoles, Madrid, ES Title: Non-invasive brain stimulation modulates corticostriatal activity

3rd Inês Esteves ISR-Lisboa and Department of Bioengineering IST, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, PT Title: Evaluation of ECG-derived respiration signals obtained in the EEG-fMRI environment