Sian Wilcox, a fourth year DPhil student in the Vyazovskiy group, has won a 2023 Goodger and Schorstein award from the Medical Sciences Divisional Funding Panel to contribute towards final year living expenses.
Sian's research focuses on torpor, a hypometabolic state similar to hibernation, that readily occurs in laboratory mice in response to food restriction. She has been investigating whether this state of torpor impacts subsequent sleep, behaviour, and physiology, and whether this could be confounding experimental data and contributing to variability in studies where fasting is used.
A major focus of her research, which is funded by the NC3Rs, is to identify ways in which to refine experimental techniques to improve both animal welfare and the robustness of the science being produced.
Sian is supervised by Professors Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, Stuart Peirson and David Bannerman and works within the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery.
Outside of the lab, Sian has also been involved in the Cortex Club, a student society that connects Oxford researchers with world-leading neuroscientists, as the Communications Officer. She also wrote for the Oxford Scientist magazine during the first two years of her studies.