Ms. WANG Xuan, a third-year doctoral student under the supervision of Dr. Raymond Chan from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Laboratory, CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, the Institute of Psychology has recently received the Early Career Award of the 2024 Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS) Congress. She has made a presentation at the 2024 Congress of the Schizophrenia International Research Society in Florence, Italy April 3-7 on the title of “Striatal-cerebellar functional connectivity in patients with schizophrenia.” There are a total of 54 Early Career Awards granted. Wang Xuan is the only one receiving the award from Chinese mainland. This is the tenth time of the NACN Lab to receive similar kind of awards for their schizophrenia research findings.

Dr. Chan was also invited by Prof. Deanna Barch from the Washington University in St. Louis to take part in the invited symposium on “Disentangling contributions to social and non-social motivation transdiagnostically”. His talk focused on the study of the relationship between range adaptation, anhedonia and amotivation in patients with schizophrenia, major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. Other presenters of the symposium included Prof. Deanna Barch, Dr. Lauren Catalano, and Prof. Susan Powell. Prof. James Gold from Maryland Psychiatric Research Centre also made a general discussion and comment on the presenters’ findings.

Moreover, current team members and alumni of the NACN Lab also attended and presented their findings including Dr. Simon Lui, Dr. YAN Chao, Dr. LI Ying, Dr. WANG Ling-ling, Mr. LI Shuai-biao and doctoral student HUANG Yi-hang.

The SIRS is the most important conference in the field of schizophrenia research. For the past few years, over a thousand of researchers and scientists came from different countries attended each conference and exchange their data, techniques and ideas, which helped to facilitate the scientific research and clinical treatments.

Fig.1 2024 Early Career Awardees. Image by Website of SIRS.

Fig.2 NACN Lab members. Image by WANG Xuan.