Dr Abdelkader Ennaceur is a Senior Lecturer in Therapeutics in the Department of Pharmacy, Health and Well-being at the University of Sunderland. His research focuses on the brain structures and neurochemical systems that underlie learning and memory, and emotion. He has developed a number of behavioral tasks for rodents that assess anxiety, learning, and memory, and these behavioral tasks form the basis of his current research projects. He has authored nearly 40 scholarly publications and in 2013 was guest editor of 25 Years of Object Recognition, a special issue of Behavioural Brain Research.
Dr. Maria de Souza Silva is deputy director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Dusseldorf. Her research investigates learning and memory processes with different behavioral paradigms and the characterization of their neurochemical mechanisms, especially the cholinergic system of the basal forebrain. The focus of this work is on the investigation of the role of neurokinin receptors (NK1, NK2 and NK3) in rodents and their involvement in aging-associated deficits. In parallel, she also investigates the development of new animal models of learning/memory and the investigation of alternative ways of drug administration for targeting the brain. She is the author of nearly 100 scholarly publications.