By Sarah Lloyd-Fox

For the first time this week (24-26th October), London hosted the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org) Grand Challenges 2016 meeting. The focus of the Foundation is to ensure children across the globe thrive rather than just survive. In 2012 Clare Elwell, Sarah Lloyd-Fox and colleagues were awarded a grant through the Grand Challenges Exploration track to take fNIRS to The Gambia and measured the first infant to have functional neuroimaging in Africa (www.globalfnirs.org). Now through extended funding the Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project (@bright_project) is using fNIRS to understand the consequences of early life risk factors such as undernutrition on brain development in The Gambia. The work featured in a Spotlight talk given by Clare Elwell during the closing session of the conference amongst speakers including Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Though Clare only had 8 minutes to present our whole project she also managed to show images of the work going on by the other groups doing NIRS in similar settings that presented in the fNIRS conference in Paris the previous week (Bangladesh, Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, Colombia, India).
Link to Dr Elwell Spotlight talk filmed by Gates.