SfN Pre-Conference Sessions

SHORT COURSE 2: Quantifying Behavior as a Lens Into the Brain

Organizer/Moderator:

This course will cover new methods for collecting behavioral data; characterizing behavioral dynamics, components and sequences; and connecting neural activity with behavior across scales. The instructors have broad expertise in the development and application of these methods across a variety of model systems, and lectures and demos will focus both on technical details as well as conceptual issues. There will also be discussion of advances that are needed to resolve the neural mechanisms that give rise to the myriad ways in which animals interact with their environments.

SHORT COURSE 1: Neural Prosthetics and Brain Machine Interfaces

Organizer/Moderator:

Brain-machine interfaces (BCIs) are devices that make direct contact with neural systems, translate brain signals into external commands, provide input to replace or augment functionality, or alter activity to disrupt dysfunction or drive plasticity. These tools are both an opportunity to replace or restore function, and a tool to better understand neural circuits. This short course will review technologies and algorithms for BCIs and neural prosthetics and discuss the transition to market. Download the 2019 Short Course 1 agenda here.

SHORT COURSE 3: Cultivating Professionalism and Excellence in the Research Landscape

Organizer/Moderator:

A significant part of achieving professional excellence and maintaining productive collaborative relationships is dependent on an institution's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion of all students, trainees, and faculty, especially those from underrepresented groups. During this short course, attendees will explore how early career neuroscientists can navigate different aspects of the research landscape, including circumstances resulting from power dynamics, structural inequities, and different forms of bias. Download the 2019 Short Course 3 agenda here.

Meet-the-Clinician-Expert, Session 1: Merit Cudkowicz- Clinical Trialists Path: Building Teams

There is an unprecedented opportunity now to develop effective treatments for people with neurological disorders. How to develop a career as a clinical trialist and approaches to developing and testing therapeutics for CNS disorders will be discussed. Examples from trials in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurological disorders will be shared.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 1: Gaia Tavosanis- Circuit Dynamics: A Fly Perspective

Neurons elaborate complex structures during development and those structures retain the capacity to undergo modifications that sustain adaptability in the adult animal's behavior. In this session, Dr. Tavosanis will examine the challenges of investigating the cell biological mechanisms of neuronal plasticity in vivo utilizing the model organism Drosophila. She will discuss her advances in revealing structural modifications in the adult fly brain and the career path that supported them.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 1: Gregory Quirk- Twenty Years of Fear Research and Mentoring in Puerto Rico

Dr. Quirk's research focuses on the neural circuits of fear regulation. He recently shifted from Pavlovian fear conditioning to an active avoidance task that pits pursuit of food against pursuit of safety. The key to his success has been creating an optimal training environment by promoting communication skills, intellectual growth, and a sense of purpose. Simple mentoring techniques can help new PIs create successful laboratories in diverse settings.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 1: Jerry Silver- Functional Regeneration Beyond the Glial Scar

The goal of the Silver lab is to understand the basic biology that underlies regeneration failure in the adult spinal cord and then use this knowledge to develop strategies to overcome the lack of regeneration in order to promote functional repair. Dr. Silver will review more than 30 years of work that has focused on one of the most interesting families of inhibitory extracellular matrix molecules, the chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans, that are involved in creating such regenerative boundaries.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 1: Kafui Dzirasa- Translating Neuroscience: Obstacles and Opportunities

Dr. Kafui Dzirasa investigates the network-level brain processes that signal emotions in health and disease. Dr. Dzirasa will describe his career path from an undergraduate chemical engineering student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County to a NIH-funded investigator at Duke University that contributed to framing BRAIN 2.0. This talk will also highlight the key patient encounters, scientific observations, and life experiences that shaped his scientific inquiry.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 1: Kamran Khodakhah- I Can't Believe They Pay Me to Have Fun: The Privilege of Being a Scientist

There is nothing more important than waking up every morning and smiling in anticipation of the coming day. The right career pick goes a long way in making that a reality. Being a neuroscientist is Dr. Khodakkah's dream job. His research aims to understand the underpinnings of cerebellar function and computation. He is interested in delineating cerebellar contributions to motor and non-motor behaviors, with an eye on unraveling the fundamental underpinnings of brain disorders.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 1: Paola Arlotta- Understanding Cortical Development and Disease: My Path to Discovery

Dr. Arlotta started her career working on the basic mechanisms that build cell diversity in the mammalian cerebral cortex. Her work now also focuses on mimicking aspects of cortical development in vitro through the generation of human brain organoids, which are stem cell-derived, reductionist replicas of the human developing brain. Dr. Arlotta will discuss her own scientific journey and the challenges associated with working with stem cell-derived models of the human brain.

Meet-the-Clinician-Expert, Session 2: Nico Dosenbach- Disuse Drives Plasticity in Human Brain Networks

Dr. Dosenbach's research focuses on characterizing human functional network organization and how it changes with development, injury, and recovery, using functional MRI (fMRI). Recently, he has pushed fMRI and resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) MRI acquisition and analysis methodology to the level of individuals, including patients. His lab has developed experimental paradigms that obtain repeated multi-modal MRI scans on the same individuals, for individual-specific image analyses.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 2: Michelle Monje-Deisseroth- Myelin Plasticity: From Cognition to Cancer

Activity-dependent plasticity of myelin is emerging as a recognized mechanism by which experience can modulate brain structure and function, with roles in motor and cognitive behavioral function. Dysregulation or dysfunction of myelin plasticity can contribute importantly to neurological disease. For example, dysfunction of adaptive myelination can cause impaired cognition following chemotherapy, while subversion of myelin plasticity mechanisms robustly promotes malignant glioma progression.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 2: Nicole Rust- Seeing and Remembering What We've Seen

Humans and other primates are extremely good at remembering images. Dr. Rust studies the neural mechanisms supporting this remarkable form of memory through investigations of human and animal visual memory behaviors, measurements and manipulations of neural activity, and computational modeling. In this talk, she will describe her lab's pursuit of the neural signal that drives the sense of remembering that an image has been seen before.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 2: Viviana Gradinaru- Machine-Learning Assisted Directed Evolution of Viral Vectors and Microbial Opsins for Minimally Invasive Neuroscience

Dr. Gradinaru's lab recently developed capsids capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier, enabling noninvasive delivery of sensors and actuators to the CNS in transgenic and non-transgenic animals. With synergistic developments in actuators, systemic Adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) will allow researchers to modulate defined cell types and circuits across multiple deep-brain structures in a minimally invasive manner and test the behavioral effects of this modulation in animal models.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 2: Yishi Jin- Understanding Molecules, Synapses, and Neural Plasticity: The Awesome Power of Genetics

Employing the powerful forward genetic analyses in C. elegans, Dr. Jin's lab has discovered key molecular pathways that instruct synapse formation, as well as the mechanisms regulating the critical period for connectivity switch in animal development and reactive neural plasticity under traumatic injury. This talk will discuss the logic and execution of curiosity-driven and the artful design of genetic analysis.

Meet-the-Expert, Session 2: Yoko Yazaki-Sugiyama- Lessons for Songbirds and Scientists: Learning to Communicate More Effectively by Listening to Others

Both songbirds and scientists learn to communicate through social interaction during development. Yoko Yazaki-Sugiyama has been investigating cell, circuit and systems mechanisms of innate songbird learning from auditory experience, including how birds detect own species song, learn intensively with vocal communication, and learn exclusively during developmental critical periods. She draws parallels to her communication skills learned by listening to others during her development as a scientist.