Every year, the Lundbeck Foundation honours five young health science researchers under the age of 30 by awarding them the Foundation’s Talent Prize. The prizewinners will each receive DKK 200,000 with which to conduct research, and DKK 100,000 as a personal gift.

This year, two of the five talents are from the Department of Clinical Medicine:

Cecilie Siggaard Jørgensen, Department of Clinical Medicine, Health

15 % of all Danish children suffer from bedwetting when they start primary school, and 5 % still have the problem to varying degrees when they complete primary school in 9th grade. PhD student Cecilie Siggaard Jørgensen, who is also a medical doctor at Aarhus University Hospital, conducts research into which treatment – medicine or a ringing device in the nightclothes – can best help children and young people who urinate in bed.

She also examines the genetics behind bedwetting, and is engaged in establishing an international biobank with blood samples from children and adolescents suffering from urinary incontinence.

Postdoc Leonardo Bonetti, Department of Clinical Medicine – Centre for Music in the Brain

Postdoc Leonardo Bonetti, who also holds a degree in classical guitar from the Conservatorio Giovanni Battista Martini college of music in Bologna, uses music to examine the brain’s cognitive processes – e.g. attention, memory and emotions.

In a research project, Leonardo Bonetti has examined which areas in the brain work together when memory is brought into play. He did this by using advanced brain scanning methods to measure the brain activity of 300 subjects while they listened and re-listened to a ‘cocktail’ of classical music – and when they listened to other kinds of classical music. The study deals with the fundamental factors that govern cognition, and Leonardo Bonetti therefore also plans to conduct similar experiments with dementia sufferers in order to broaden the understanding of the effects of dementia on cognitive capacity.

Contact

Doctor and PhD Student Cecilie Siggaard Jørgensen
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine and
Aarhus University Hospital, Centre for Child Incontinence
E-mail: cecilie.siggaard@clin.au.dk

Postdoc Leonardo Bonetti
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine – Centre for Music in the Brain
E-mail: leonardo.bonetti@clin.au.dk

This coverage is based on press material from the Lundbeck Foundation.