Marie Salomonová

After graduating from Open Gate, a bilingual boarding school near Prague, where I successfully ended my high school studies with the Czech maturita and International Baccalaureate exams, I was fortunate to receive a scholarship from the Bakala Foundation which allowed me to continue my studies at the University of Nottingham. I enrolled in the Neuroscience integrated Masters degree program which also involved a year-long research internship that I spent at the Institute of Neuroimmunology of the Slovak Academy of Science. There, I had the chance to work in a team developing animal models of Alzheimer’s disease. In my final year, I worked in a Nottingham-based laboratory researching the effects of chemotherapy on adult hippocampal neurogenesis. For that I also utilised animal models, which still remain my interest, and I am hoping to further study their development and use in the neuroscience research, should I proceed to doctoral studies. After returning home I joined one of my fellow Bakala Scholar’s, Tereze Růžičková, in launching the “Nevypusť duši!” campaign, the goal of which is to increase the Czech public’s awareness about mental health and disease. Our project utilises social networks for spreading facts, breaking the myths, improving prevention, and destigmatising psychiatric diseases.