Marcin Szwed is a neuroscientist. He studied biology at the Jagiellonian University. After completing his PhD at the Weizmann Institute and spending five years as a postdoctoral researcher in Paris, he returned to Kraków in 2011, where he established his own research team focused on human brain imaging. His research focuses on change in the brain in its both positive and negative aspects.
The positive change is the plasticity that occurs when the brain is reorganized in individuals who are blind or deaf. It is a process where a part of the brain, for example the visual cortex, is either rewired to perform an old task, such as reading, with a new sense, such as touch, or rewired to perform a new task, like language or memory. Deaf and blind people have lost critical sensory input and this has profoundly altered the way their brains work. By studying them, we can understand the forces that shape the brain.
The negative change that we study is the detrimental impact of air pollution on brain development. Since 2019, he has begun his journey into environmental neuroscience as the leader of the NeuroSmog project, which aims to investigate the impact of air pollution on the developing brains of school-aged children. While the harmful effects of smog on respiratory and cardiovascular diseases are well known, much less is understood about its effects on the brain. Fighting smog has a social cost. If we ask people to make sacrifices and change their lifestyles, we must obtain the best possible knowledge about the impact of this pollution. This is the purpose of the Neurosmog project.
Prof. Szwed has published several dozen scientific articles, including a few that he considers truly important. He has received several awards.
For more information, please visit the Szwed Lab website and the author’s Google Scholar profile.