ADInstruments Blog

Colin Olivier, one of our talented Applications Scientists and the Technical Sales representative for Northeastern USA, reports back from CrawFly - the renowned Neurophysiology Workshop for Educators run by Cornell University and ADInstruments as part of the Classroom of Excellence series. We'd like to thank everyone involved for helping to make it a great success, and special thanks to Mike Kaplan, PhD for the awesome photography! And if you haven't been yet, read on to see what CrawFly is like…

Last week, thousands of medical educators, administrators, researchers and students converged on Glasgow for the annual meeting of AMEE , the Association of Medical Educators in Europe - five intense days for people at all stages of their careers to exchange ideas and learn about the latest advances in this field. Whether you wanted to know " Has the medical student changed?" or "How do you invent a model abscess?", AMEE 2015 had an answer for you!

Meet Dr Hannah Critchlow of Cambridge University, a passionate neuroscientist and powerful storyteller who spoke at the Hay Festival in Wales earlier this year about the brain and human creativity, analysing the brainwaves of her audience using an EEG kit and PowerLab and wiring up a writer to show how the creative brain goes about composing a difficult chapter​. We spoke to Hannah about the festival, her love of neuroscience and what inspires her.

Here at ADInstruments , we have been working hard to ensure that our software is going to be compatible with Windows 10, the latest release from Microsoft. Read on to see if upgrading will affect your version of LabChart, LabTutor or Lt.

For the last few years we have been the proud sponsor of the Sam Drogo Technology in the Classroom Award, which not only recognizes great qualities in instructors such as the courage and vision to innovate in the classroom, but also celebrates the life of a friend and passionate physiology educator with whom we worked for many years. T his year we'd like to congratulate two awardees, Dr. Louise Lexis of La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia and Dr. Janet Casagrand from the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.

In autumn of 2014, we were proud to sponsor a poetry competition run by the UK Physiological Society in conjunction with Biology week. The challenge was to write an “Ode to physiology” and was open to two student age groups: under 11’s and under 19’s.

The ADInstruments team​ have long been strong advocates for innovation in teaching and for creative use of technology in the classroom, and we're pleased to show our support for creative educators with the Macknight award, to be presented at EB 2015. This year the winner is Dr. Trevor Day of Mt Royal University, Calgary, Canada.

Sponsored by ADInstruments and awarded by the APS Neural Control and Autonomic Regulation Section (NCAR) , this award recognizes the achievements of a promising, early-career scientist who has made a significant contribution to the understanding of neural control and autonomic regulation. This year the winner of the Michael J. Brody Young Investigator award is Dr. Jacqueline Limberg for her work on the control of blood pressure during hypoglycemia. Congratulations from all of us at ADInstruments !

Places are still available to attend this year’s Crawfly Neurophysiology Educator Workshop . A collaboration between ADInstruments and Cornell University, the workshop covers practical and dynamic methods of teaching invertebrate neurophysiology with common model systems, including crawdad and fruitfly .

We’d like to congratulate Dr Wes Colgan on receiving the Faculty of Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN) Educator of the Year Award, presented at this year’s Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington DC.

Most people are probably familiar with the physiological effects of eating chili peppers, such as increased sweating, flushed skin and a feeling of heat - effects mediated by chili pepper's active ingredient, capsaicin. Recently researchers have been exploring the therapeutic value of these effects and in particular, how they can be used to reduce stroke injury.

We’d like to thank everyone who came to our Physiology Educator workshops - in all, 146 attendees from 23 universities - at the Physiological Society of Nigeria and International Union of Physiological Sciences meeting in Lagos last month.

We were very proud and honored that the Prime Minister of New Zealand, the Right Honorable John Key visited our office in Dunedin yesterday, accompanied by the Minister for Science and Innovation, Steven Joyce.