Congratulations to Dr. Muzaffer Kaser who won the runner-up prize at the post-doctoral plenary competition at the Clinical Academics in Training Annual Conference organised by the Academy of Medical Sciences!

The conference is an annual showcase of research by clinical academics in training across the UK. It was held in Edinburgh and 70 trainee clinical academics presented their work as posters or oral presentation. Dr Kaser’s abstract on how modafinil can affect decision-making in patients with depression was selected for the oral presentation competition. In the study, he used computational modelling to identify latent variables of reinforcement learning and showed that patients receiving modafinil showed more exploratory behaviour in response to losses compared to patients receiving placebo.

Dr. Kaser reports on the experience:

It was an amazing experience to present at the conference among many brilliant clinical scientists across all disciplines. I am still chuffed by picking up a prize. The whole process helped me to conceptualise my research in a better way. I hope this will lead to a top quality research article.