Beautiful Mind

In Ireland, the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on well-being has been investigated through population surveys, however national statistics on mental distress are lacking. My PhD is investigating the impact of COVID-19 to mental health as lessons learned to improve future public health responses.

Where do brains come from? This seems like a weird question at first, but think about it – over the course of 9 months you need to go from not having a brain to, well, having one. And the most amazing thing is that this wonderful organ inside your head that controls your every thought and movement builds itself. The only problem is that a lot of outside stressors can cause things to go wrong in all sorts of weird and interesting ways. So let’s have a look at how brains build themselves and why sometimes it doesn’t go as planned.

Will yogurt make you wise? How can your breakfast make you a gambler? Are the microbes in your gut telling you what to do? What’s the meaning of life?
All these questions will be answered through the lens of the gut-brain axis, which is the way of interaction between these two amazing organs. It’s intuitive to think that when we’re hungry, the gut is telling the brain to look for food. Food is another key player, having good diet is important for our health in general, but what we eat can also change our brain, the way we think, and how we make decisions. You are what your microbes eat.

The microbiota is emerging as a unique source of metabolites with potential to modulate targets across the gut-brain axis, which provides a promising opportunity to mine for effective biotherapeutics and microbiota-targeted strategies against obesity, appetite-regulation and stress. In this talk I will highlight some of the ways in which we can search for the most promising bacteria for development into novel effective probiotics. This will pave the way forward to develop probiotics to help us cope in an ever increasing obesogenic world and increase our stress resilience.