Beatriz Rico receives Wellcome Investigator Award

Professor Beatriz Rico from the Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London has been awarded a prestigious Investigator Award in Science by Wellcome.

With this new award, the Centre for Developmental Neurobiology has a total of four Wellcome Investigators. These awards offer flexible funding support to researchers at all career stages, enabling them to tackle the most important questions in their field. 

The funding, worth over £2 million, will support Professor Rico’s pioneering research into how specific neural networks are assembled and organised during brain development. Increasing evidence suggests that neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia, may be caused by a failure in the function of specific circuitries. A better understanding of these networks could ultimately lead to new treatments for neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. 

Professor Rico from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), said: ‘The Wellcome Investigator award will give me the opportunity to dream big and unleash my creativity as a scientist. This is the best breeding ground for delivering excellent science. In the next 5 years my lab will discover some of the general rules orchestrating the integration of interneurons into different subnetworks in the cerebral cortex.’

Professor Rico has previously received the EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) Young Investigator Award and she currently holds a ERC (European Research Council) Consolidator Grant.

To find out more about Wellcome Investigator Awards, visit their website.