Interested in excellent summer courses in computational neuroscience?
METHODS IN COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
Directors: William Bialek, Princeton University and Rob de Ruyter, NEC
Research Institute.
A summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory
August 4-September 1, 2002
APPLICATION DEADLINE MARCH 7, 2002
Animals interact with a complex world, encountering a wide variety of
challenges: they must gather data about the environment, discover useful
structures in these data, store and recall information about past events,
plan and guide actions, learn the consequences of these actions, etc. These
are, in part, computational problems that are solved by networks of
neurons, from roughly 100 cells in a small worm to 100 billion in humans.
Careful study of the natural context for these tasks leads to new
mathematical formulations of the problems that brains are solving, and
these theoretical approaches in turn suggest new experiments to
characterize neurons and networks. This interplay between theory and
experiment is the central theme of this course.
In each of the firs three weeks, the course will focus on a distinct
question: Can we measure the quality of the brain's solutions to the
complex computational problems that arise in the natural environment? Can
these problems be decomposed into manageable pieces, and can we relate such
mathematical decompositions to the observable properties of individual
neurons and circuits? Can we identify the molecular mechanisms that provide
the building blocks for these computations, and understand how these
building blocks are organized into cells and circuits that perform useful
functions?
Core presentations at the start of each week will be given jointly by
theorists and experimentalists who have worked, often together, on the same
problems. As each week progresses, the issues brought up in these
presentations will be illustrated by laboratory demonstrations; tutorials
will fill in background material; and seminars will provide a sampling of
work on closely related problems. The final, and crucial, component of each
weeks activities is a set of exercises that begin with raw experimental
data and invite the students to follow and generalize the paths outlined in
the lectures. These exercises will involve both quantitative analysis of
the data and exploration of models through analytic and numerical
techniques. To reinforce the theme of collaboration between theory and
experiment, exercises will be done by teams of students that combine
theoretical and experimental backgrounds.
The fourth week of the course is reserved for student projects. These
projects provide the opportunity to work closely with the resident faculty,
to develop ideas that grew out of the lectures and seminars, and to connect
these ideas with problems from the students' own research topics.
This course is appropriate for graduate students, postdocs and faculty in a
variety of fields, from zoology and ethology to physics and mathematics.
Students are expected to have a strong background in one discipline, and to
have made some effort to introduce themselves to a complementary
discipline. The course is limited to 24 students, who will be chosen to
balance the representation of theoretical and experimental backgrounds.
For more information, please see the attached pdf file.
Diana E.J. Blazis, Ph.D. dblazis@mbl.edu
Staff Scientist and Director,
CASSLS at the Marine Biological Laboratory PH (508) 289-7535
7 MBL Street, Woods Hole, MA 02543 FAX (508) 289-7951
http://www.mbl.edu/CASSLS
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