NSF Funded workshop - Future Frameworks of Theoretical Neuroscience, Feb 4-7, 2019, San Antonio, TX.

Call for applications to participate: graduate students, postdoctoral fellows & junior assistant professors

As it is widely known, the objective of the BRAIN initiative has been to develop novel neurotechnologies, which will provide vast streams of experimental data in the coming years. For the neuroscience community as a whole to benefit from these advances, theoretical frameworks that span across scales, systems, and species need to be developed.  The main challenge for the theoretical neuroscience community is to design these frameworks with a long-term vision to anticipate and guide the development of new techniques and experiments. We view this as a collective effort. Another of our objectives is for the theoretical neuroscience community to identify leading areas of scientific inquiry, key theoretical questions, and to discuss methodological ways to address these questions. This will highly contribute to shape the future research endeavors towards the understanding of brain function across interacting levels of organization, scales, and range of species. This will also help the funding agencies to establish programs and priorities. 

The workshop will take place in San Antonio, TX from Feb 4-7, 2019. The NSF will cover the participant’s transportation (up to $500, economy class, no upgrades) and lodging (up to 4 nights) for a selected group junior researchers. If interested, please submit a CV and two paragraphs describing the reason(s) to participate in the workshop (1 page maximum, divided into two paragraphs, one titled ‘present work’ and another one titled ‘motivation’). While all the neuroscience community is encouraged to apply we are also looking for people outside neuroscience with fresh ideas that would like to participate.  

Please send your application to fidel.santamaria@utsa.edu with the subject line [Framework Workshop] Application no later than October 10, 2018.

As a participant, we would like you to contribute to (1) the description of the present framework(s) of theoretical neuroscience; and (2) the definition of a roadmap for the development of future theories of brain function across scales. In practice, we would like you to contribute to identifying key questions and organizing principles across scales of biological organization that share common theoretical foundations. We also would like you to interact with other participants to develop strategies to advance the field in order to “…transform our understanding of the linkages between neural activity and cognition and behavior across different systems, environments, and species.”

We would like to emphasize that the objective of the workshop is not to describe current projects but the ideas and theories that are yet to be developed and are needed to move the field forward.  While the meeting will have a component of talks we will devote most of the time to organizing formal and informal discussions among the participants. We expect the participants to collectively produce a series of papers describing the identified fields, state of the art and present/future questions so these can reach the broader community and foster additional discussions and interactions. We will also generate a white paper to distribute to public and private funding agencies that describe our views of the future frameworks of theoretical neuroscience.

More information available at http://www.utsa.edu/SantamariaLab/Workshop/

Horacio G. Rotstein (NJIT) & Fidel Santamaria (UTSA)

Organizers

_______________________________________________________________________________

Fidel Santamaria, PhD

Associate Professor

Department of Biology

University of Texas at San Antonio

www.utsa.edu/SantamariaLab

Office: BSB 1.03.30

Tel +1(210) 458 6910