From left: Taylor Stevenson and Igor Felippe
Congratulations to Igor Felippe, Department of Physiology and Taylor Stevenson, Department of Anatomy and Medical Imaging. They have been awarded the SMS Doctoral Publication Excellence Prize 2021 and best Doctoral Publication Prize for their Department.
Igor’s paper, which was published in the journal Cardiovascular Research (impact factor = 10.787) which is the journal supported by the European Society of Cardiology, is entitled ‘Autonomic innervation of the carotid body as a determinant of its sensitivity: implications for cardiovascular physiology and pathology’. Igor is supervised by Professor Julian Paton and co-supervised by Dr Daniel McCormick from Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI). Igor’s paper had a front cover award and was marked as April Editor’s Choice, making it free access, because of its excellence.
This is not a review that regurgitates literature but rather a hypothetical piece containing novel integration of existing literature with assimilation of original thoughts, ideas and proposed new studies; this review led to Igor’s original research which has been conditionally accepted for publication also in Cardiovascular Research a stellar journal.
After only one year, Igor’s review already has six citations, an Altmetric score of 18, 1,690 accesses, 506 downloads, and 33 tweets. These numbers indicate that his work is being well accepted by the scientific community.
Taylor Stevenson is a PhD student under the supervision of Prof Maurice Curtis, Prof Mike Dragunow and Dr Victor Dieriks. His paper is entitled ‘α-synuclein inclusions are abundant in non-neuronal cells in the anterior olfactory nucleus of the Parkinson’s disease olfactory bulb’ was published in Scientific Reports (IF 4) on 21 April 2020. It was one of the first papers to demonstrate that non-neuronal cells – pericytes, astrocytes and microglia contain α-synuclein (the pathological protein in Parkinson’s disease) in the human olfactory bulb. This provided evidence that these cells may be directly involved in the progression of Parkinson’s disease, drawing attention to a new area of research in the Parkinson’s disease field.
Taylor’s work has 16 citations, an Altmetric score of 26, and 4193 accesses. His paper was also added to a collection of five papers published in 2020 in Scientific Reports in the ‘Editor’s choice: neurodegenerative diseases – observations’. The paper is also part of Top 100 in Neuroscience. This collection highlights Scientific Reports most downloaded neuroscience papers published in 2020.