BNA Local Groups Forum 2025: connecting neuroscience across cities, regions and the country

On 8th September 2025, 28 Local Group Representatives (LGRs) and Local Group Student Representatives (LGSRs) from BNA Local Groups around the UK and Ireland gathered in London at the University of Westminster for the 2025 BNA Local Groups Forum. LGRs and LGSRs are BNA members who have taken on a voluntary role to listen to the priorities of their local neuroscience communities. They work together with local BNA members – across all the institutions and sectors in which they're based – to collectively plan and make impactful local interventions that deliver the change that their community wants.

This annual Forum is one of the most important dates in the BNA calendar and is hosted by a different Local Group each year. At the event, LGRs and LGSRs come together to share skills, celebrate successes, and represent their local neuroscience communities in national-level conversations about how we can best continue to take our organisation forwards. This year hosted by the Westminster area BNA Local Group, the Forum's programme featured some recent highlights from Local-Group-run BNA events in London and the North East, an exploration of the Cardiff area BNA Local Group's cross-sector connector strategy, and practical ways to support new members to get involved in their Local Group's activity.

The day's schedule was kicked off by BNA President Narender Ramnani, who welcomed a full room of reps – some who have been part of the network since its inception and some who joined only a few weeks ago – by congratulating them on their work over the past year and announcing the host of new BNA committees, advisory boards and working groups that mean Local Groups are represented at every level of the BNA's governance. After updates on new core opportunities to share with our communities around the country (BNA-supported RSB accreditation of neuroscience undergraduate courses, the BNA Training Academy, and Group Membership), we then heard about the hundreds of new members who have joined the BNA over the last year and the new digital tools reps now have to support them to get involved in Local Group activity right off the bat. We also celebrated new LGRs and LGSRs from the University of Aberdeen, Cardiff University, the University of Leeds, the University of Manchester, Middlesex University, Newcastle University, Northumbria University, the University of Nottingham, the University of Westminster and the University of York – some of whom are building a BNA community in their institutions for the very first time.

A relaxed lunch gave us all a chance to catch up socially, discuss ongoing projects in each of our Local Groups, and swap skills and tips gleaned from our last year of community organising. By the afternoon, we were warmed up to discuss in detail a few particularly innovative efforts and achievements:

• Dr Kam Ameen-Ali (Teesside University) and Dr Paul Hubbard (Newcastle University) reviewed their North East Neuroscience Meeting from June, which had brought together neuroscientists from across the Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Durham area Local Groups. Emerging from a chronic lack of inter-institutional connectivity in the region long reported by local communities, the meeting brought together dozens of researchers from all career stages to share their research, forge collaborations, and learn about the BNA Local Groups growing in the area that they could get involved with to continue doing so. As well as bringing tangible benefit to attendees to meet a specific need, the meeting brought more neuroscientists into the BNA so that they in turn can develop the community projects that they feel are needed. In fact, the meeting inspired two attendees to become reps: Justin Andrushko from Northumberland University and Jane Zhuk from Newcastle University. Reps from Local Groups in other regions were blown away by the scale of what Kam and Paul had achieved with so few resources, and are keen to reproduce similar regional meetings where the same need is identified among their own communities. Kam and Paul – along with the other new reps in the area – are already making the most of the momentum this event generated and are planning for their next even more ambitious intervention alongside an organising committee of other local BNA members. Watch this space!
• Dr Joan Liu and Vera Bowerman from the Westminster area Local Group then took the stage alongside BNA Scholar Amina Begum and presented an overview of a series of interventions that their Local Group had made within the university. Carefully liaising with leaders within the Schools of Life Sciences, Psychology and Arts, they worked together to produce a full week of events for Dana Foundation’s 2025 Brain Awareness Week. Vera in particular, working with a team of other LGSRs who have now graduated, worked tirelessly using creative newsletter communications to engage and recruit students to the BNA. Through a neuroscience symposium, brain health workshops, a brain tissue staining lab, a "Brain & Clay" session and a talk with survivors of Acquired Brain Injury, the Local Group worked to raise awareness of neuroscience research and national BNA activities among a range of communities interested in neuroscience – not only among neuroscientists themselves.
• Finally, Membership & Comminities Manager Dani Wijesinghe introduced the "Local Hub" model that the Cardiff area Local Group are developing. The team of reps in the Cardiff area are responding to a deeply fragmented neuroscience community, with researchers scattered across multiple siloed schools and divisions and unable to easily collaborate across the university let alone between institutions and sectors. Despite appetite from all parties including university leadership, the coordination of budgets, resources and time across the community has proven to be near impossible without dedicated infrastructure. And so, the BNA Local Group there is creating just that! Starting within the university, the reps here are carefully organising in each of the schools and divisions by identifying leaders and encouraging them to join a team to co-produce a huge research-sharing meeting next year to demonstrate the potential for collaboration in the area, with local industry and clinical organisations also to be represented. Each part of the community will then have its own rep, who together will form a committee of LGRs spanning the breadth of neuroscience in the area and ensuring that everyone is represented. Their long-term aim is to use the success of their meeting, and their newfound "Local Hub" rep structure, to bring all parties together to secure dedicated funding for the development and maintainance of a cross-sector Cardiff-wide directory of neuroscientists and allied specialists to better facilitate connection among the community.

If you could change one thing about neuroscience in your local area, what would it be? Do your peers and others across the different institutions in your area feel similarly? By joining your BNA Local Group and working with your Local Group Representatives to devise a strategy and secure project funding, together you can drive local change, and take collective ownership over the future of neuroscience where you are.

The BNA extends special thanks to Dr Joan Liu and Vera Bowerman at the University of Westminster for arranging this year's annual Forum, and to Professor Talitha Kerrigan for her organisation as BNA Local Groups Coordinator.