The FENS Regional Meeting Committee
The FENS Regional Meeting Committee (FRM) is a special committee which advises the Executive Committee and the Governing Council on the proposals received from the societies.
Chairperson

Ole Kiehn, Denmark
FENS President-elect
2022-2024
Ole Kiehn is a currently Professor in Integrative Neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Professor in Neurophysiology at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He received his MD in 1985 and Dr Sci. in 1990 from the University of Copenhagen and was a postdoc at Cornell University, US. He studies the organisation of neuronal circuits that execute movements. His work has identified key elements of spinal circuitries necessary for producing changes in timing and coordination of locomotion and delineated the diversification of brainstem circuits involved in the episodic expression or context-dependent selection of locomotor behaviour. His work demonstrates translational potential in developing therapies for movement disorders caused by trauma or disease to the nervous system. Kiehn’s work has been recognized with the Schellenberg Prize, Kirsten and Freddy Johansen’s preclinical prize, The Brain Prize (2022), Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg’s Professorship, a distinguished professorship award at KI, ERC advanced grants. He is an elected member of EMBO, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Academia Europea and the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet (since 2008) and the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine (2014-2019).
Committee Members

Patricia Gaspar, France
Chair CHET Committee
2020-2024
Patricia Gaspar is an Emeritus researcher of INSERM (Institut pour la Santé et la Recherche Médicale), working at the Paris Brain Institute. She trained as an MD in neurology and neuropathology (1983), and obtained a PhD in neuropharmacology from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris (1985). She obtained a full-time research position at the INSERM as group leader and then laboratory director at the Salpêtrière Hospital. She co-headed the Institut du Fer à Moulin (2007-2012) and directed the Ecole des Neurosciences de Paris (2010-14). The main aim of her research has been to better our understanding of the developmental basis of neuropsychiatric disorders. She has largely focused on the developmental role of serotonin (5-HT). Among the current research themes in the laboratory are projects aimed to identify mechanisms the role of 5-HT in parental behavior and early life stress.
She had the opportunity to work 2 years abroad: as MD in Tunisia, (Center of Neurology of Tunis :1979-1980) and as a visiting professor in the US (Jon Kaas laboratory, University of Vanderbilt: 1990-91). Throughout her career, she been involved in a number of general interest tasks for evaluation of research in France and abroad.

Liset Menendez de la Prida, Spain
Chair of the Programme Committee
2022-2024
Liset M de la Prida graduated in Physics in 1994 and received her PhD
from the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante in 1998. After
postdoctoral training with Richard Miles in Paris she became Lab
Director at the Instituto Cajal in 2008. She was honored as the Best
Graduate Student and awarded the PhD Extraordinary Prize, and has earned
prestigious fellowships and grants from EMBO, HFSP and the European
Commission under different framework programs. The main goal of her
lab is to understand the function of hippocampal and para-hippocampal
circuits. She is a leading international expert in the study of the
basic mechanisms of physiological ripples and epileptic fast ripples,
with strong visibility as developer of novel groundbreaking
electrophysiological tools. Dr. de la Prida serves as an Editor for
specialized journals including Journal of Neuroscience Methods and
eNeuro, and has commissioning duties in the American Epilepsy Society
(Task Force Working Groups) and the Spanish Society of Neuroscience.

Tomás Ryan, Ireland
Member of the Programme Committee
2022-2024
Tomás Ryan is Associate Professor in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin and Principal Investigator at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. The Ryan Lab investigates the fundamental neurobiology of engram cell ensembles in learning and memory. Tomás originally graduated from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland 2005 with a BA in genetics.
He completed his PhD in molecular neuroscience under the supervision of Seth Grant at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK in 2010. His thesis work was supported by a Wellcome Trust PhD Fellowship. Following a year as Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, he relocated to the USA to work as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the group of Susumu Tonegawa (Nobel Laureate, 1987) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, he was centrally involved in the development of novel genetic methods that allow for the labelling and manipulation of specific memory engrams in the rodent brain.
He returned to Europe in 2017, to start his independent research group at Trinity College Dublin. His research has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the Irish Research Council (IRC), the Jacobs Foundation, the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Tomás is a past-Chair of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence (2019 – 2021).

Irene Tracey, United Kingdom
FENS President
2022-2024
Professor Irene Tracey is FENS President (2022-2024) and Vice Chancellor at the University of Oxford. She is a former Warden of Merton College, Oxford, as well as Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience and Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She did her undergraduate and graduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, where she focused her research on the early use of magnetic resonance imaging methods to study disease mechanisms in humans. Subsequent to a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, she was a founding member of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and was its director from 2005 until 2015.
Alongside senior leadership roles within the University, Irene has served and continues to serve on many national and international committees, such as the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), British Neuroscience Association, the Lundbeck Brain Prize Committee and by appointment of the government, the UK Medical Research Council.
She is a passionate advocate for women in science and is involved in several mentorship schemes. Over the past 25 years, her multidisciplinary research team has contributed to a better understanding of pain perception, pain relief and nociceptive processing within the injured and non-injured human central nervous system using advanced neuroimaging techniques and novel paradigm designs. They have also been investigating the neural basis of altered states of consciousness induced by anaesthetic agents.