Silvering the Cerebrum
9.30am Registration and coffee
10.00am Welcome by Chair Gill Hedley
10.05am Sunflowers and Sentimental Amines by Professor Andrew Lees
10.25am Visualising neurodegenerative diseases by Dr Tammaryn Lashley
10.50am A flavour and insight into Cajal’s work by Dr Juan A. De Carlos
11.10am Questions
11.20am Coffee and tea
11.45am Embroidered minds by Leslie Forbes
12.10pm From the Grave – The Desire to be Healed by Dr Carmen Fracchia
12.45pm There’s a Vision in My Memory, 1999. Film by Dillwyn Smith
12.50pm Questions and panel discussion with speakers and Dillwyn Smith
13.10pm Closing remarks by Gill Hedley
For further information about Silvering the Cerebrum please see:
www.silveringthecerebrum.com
Symposium Programme
21st April 2016: 9.30am –1.30pm
Basement Lecture Theatre
33 Queen Square
National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery
Speakers
Professor Andrew Lees
MD, FRCP, FMedSci,
Institute of Neurology, University College London
Dr Tammaryn Lashley
Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellow,
University College London
Dr Juan A. De Carlos
Instituto Cajal (C.S.I.C.) Madrid
Leslie Forbes
Award-winning author, designer and
radio broadcaster
Dr Carmen Fracchia
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Spanish
Visual Studies, Birkbeck University of London
Dillwyn Smith
Artist in Residence, Queen Square Brain Bank
for Neurological Disorders
Chaired by Gill Hedley
Independent curator, consultant on the
contemporary visual arts, writer and critic
Speakers’ Biographies
Professor Andrew Lees is Emeritus Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology
and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London. He is the recipient of numerous awards including
the American Academy of Neurology Life Time Achievement Award, the Association of British
Neurologist’s Medal, the Dingebauer Prize for Outstanding Research and the Gowers Medal. He is
one of the three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world. He is also the author
of several books, including Ray of Hope, runner-up in the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, The
Hurricane Port and The Silent Plague. His latest book Mentored by a Madman;The William Burroughs
Experiment describes his attempts to find new treatments for Parkinson’s disease. Andrew came
to neurology via Richard Spruce and botany, and was captivated by Cajal’s divine brain garden.
Dr Tammaryn Lashley is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellow at University College
London (UCL). Tammaryn enrolled in a PhD programme at UCL investigating two hereditary dementias,
familial British and familial Danish dementia, under the supervision of neuropathologist Professor Tamas
Revesz. She spent time in Professor Ghiso’s laboratory at New York University where she received
intensive training in all the basic methodologies to purify and analyse amyloid deposits. After earning
her PhD degree from UCL in 2006 Tammaryn remained with Professor Revesz’s research group,
widening her research focus to include neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease
and frontotemporal lobar degeneration. She has published extensively both as first author and in
collaboration with other groups and has presented her research on numerous occasions at national
and international meetings. Tammaryn has recently been awarded a senior research fellowship from
Alzheimer’s Research UK to continue her independent research into frontotemporal dementias.
Dr Juan A. De Carlos, Instituto Cajal (C.S.I.C) Madrid received his PhD in Neurobiology from the
University Autonoma of Madrid in 1984. After post-doctoral training at the Washington University in
St. Louis, Missouri and The Salk Institute, La Jolla, California with Professor Dennis O´Leary, he was
appointed as staff scientist at the Cajal Institute (Spanish National Research Council, C.S.I.C, Madrid).
He leads a research group interested in the fundamental mechanisms that regulate development
of telencephalic structures, focusing on the cerebral mantle and the olfactory cortex. His research
combines cutting-edge imaging techniques and conventional cellular and molecular methods. Dr De
Carlos has collaborated with many laboratories around the world and belongs to several neuroscientific
associations, and has been curator of the Cajal Legacy at the Cajal Institute for more than 10 years.
Continued overleaf
Speakers’ Biographies
Dr Carmen Fracchia is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Spanish Visual Studies in the Department
of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck University of London. Her research interest is in early modern
Spanish notions of human diversity, religion, history of medicine, slavery and ethnic prejudice,
intellectual and religious thought, and the ways visual artists articulate subjectivity, slavery, freedom
and hybridity. Her work has received considerable international recognition through publications
in journals and presentations at national and international conferences. Carmen has been a
researcher in three international projects on different aspects of slavery and abolitionism in Spain
at the University of Granada, Spain (2008-2013) sponsored by the Spanish government. Her
current book project ‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Art in Imperial Spain, 1480–1800 explores
the emergence of the slave and freed slave subjects in the visual form of Imperial Spain.
Leslie Forbes, award-winning author, designer and radio broadcaster has always crossed artscience borders in her work. Life imitated art a few years ago when she began having epileptic
seizures that affect her language skills. Currently an outpatient at Queen Square, she has
initiated a project with artists, doctors and historians to create a novel ‘Embroidered Minds of the
Morris Women’ and a series of exhibitions. The aim is to interpret how the epilepsy suffered by
William Morris’s family, who lived in Queen Square for many years, affected the family’s creativity.
Leslie is exploring parallels between Dillwyn Smith’s project and ‘Embroidered Minds’.
Gill Hedley worked as a museum curator in regional museums before organising major exhibitions
world-wide for the British Council including Francis Bacon in Moscow, 1988 and Richard Hamilton
in Venice, 1993. From 1993–2006 she was Director of the Contemporary Art Society working
closely with curators and private collectors. Now freelance, she works as an exhibition curator,
museum consultant, biographer and advisor to a number of individual artists. She curated Dillwyn
Smith’s solo exhibition Dirty Linen at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art in 2014 and is currently
working with Dillwyn on an expanded touring exhibition of Silvering the Cerebrum for 2017/8.
For further information about Silvering the Cerebrum please see:
www.silveringthecerebrum.com