On Friday 8 March 2019, Professor Bente Pakkenberg and Senior Researcher Mikkel Vestergaard Olesen are giving a Global Excellence lecture entitled "Stereology applied to the central nervous system using histologisk sections and MRI".
Professor Bente Pakkenberg is head of the Research Laboratory for Stereology and Neuroscience. She has a background as one of the main founders of the concept of neurostereology in close collaboration with Professor emeritus Hans Jørgen Gundersen, Aarhus University. Through the 1990s and onward, she and her collaborators have applied the new scientific field, neurostereology, to human brains to describe structural changes caused by gender, age and disease. The methods include the physical and optical disector, the fractionator, and the nucleator that have been applied to brains from subjects with e.g. schizophrenia, Alzheimer´s dementia, chronic alcoholism, AIDS, ALS, and Parkinson´s disease. The main focus of the projects has been to obtain data for the human brain using methods that are superior to those previously available. Secondly, to be able to explain functional deficits from anatomical changes.
Professor Bente Pakkenberg has taught/organized or co-organized ≥80 national or international stereology courses and act as international expert in neurostereology and continuously supervise students in the application of stereological methods. Recently, her group has been setting up a molecular unit at the research laboratory to unite the techniques of stereology with the methods of molecular biology. The present and future aims are to apply stereology and molecular biology to animal models of brain disorders and to perform translational studies on animal models and postmortem human brains with special focus on neurodegenerative diseases such as Multiple System Atrophy and Parkinson´s disease. It is their goal to combine broad expertise with human brain processing, all-round histological stainings and neuroanatomical resolution with molecular biology, immunohistochemistry and in situ-hybridization.
The Global Excellence Lecture will be held in the MR Conference Room at 09:00 on Friday 8 March 2019.
