In July, Professor Giuseppe Di Giovanni of the University of Malta and coordinator of the Malta Neuroscience Network, met Dr Martin Spillane, the Warwick Alumni Ambassador to Malta and Warwick Visiting Fellow, and Professor Bruno Frenguelli of the Warwick School of Life Sciences, to discuss a Warwick initiative to promote research and teaching collaboration between the Malta and Warwick Neuroscience communities.

It is proposed to have joint Warwick-Malta Ph.D. and M.Sc. research programmes and an exchange of Neuroscience staff and post-graduate researchers. In many areas of Neuroscience there are similarities in approach at Malta and at Warwick and the collaboration will be very profitable in furthering research, particularly in the area of Epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease and other disorders of the Central Nervous System.

The rector of the University of Malta, Professor Alfred J. Vella and Malta pro-rector for International Development, Prof. Godfrey Baldacchino, himself the holder of a Warwick Ph.D., have given their full support to the Warwick proposal and it is intended that the first exchanges of students and lecturers will take place in January of next year.

The programme, in its final form is to be presented at the sixth Mediterranean Neuroscience Society Conference, to be held in St Julian's in June, hosted by the Malta Neuroscience Network with the support of the University of Malta and the University of Warwick. The conference will bring up to 500 Neuroscience researchers to Malta and follows the 2015 conference, which was held in Pula, on the island of Sardinia in Italy.

For more information, contact Prof. Di Giovanni on [email protected] or Dr Martin G. Spillane on [email protected]