We are writing to announce that registration is now open for the Kavli Brain Forum Symposium at Emory, which will take place at Emory on May 18-19, 2017. Speakers at the symposium, which is entitled “New Directions in Motor Control”, will discuss their work exploring how the nervous system controls complex behaviors, with emphasis on how the brain employs sensory information to guide motor action and how patterns of motor activity are organized in space and time. This workshop is sponsored by the Kavli Brain Forum at Emory and Georgia Tech, Emory’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and an anonymous gift to promote theoretical physics approaches in biology.

The conference, which will include both formal presentations and half-day small-group tutorials on advanced methods for analyzing neural and behavioral data, will be held at the Emory Conference Center and Hotel (1615 Clifton Rd, Atlanta, GA, 30329). Presentations will be given by a number of distinguished neuroscientists from around the world as well as by members of the local neuroscience community.

REGISTRATION DETAILS:
Conference registration is free and open to all, however you must be registered to attend the workshop/tutorials.

Please visit the workshop website ( http://www.physics.emory.edu/home/new-directions-in-motor-control/index.html ) for registration information and to find more information on the workshops and tutorials. All attendees must register by May 4, 2017.

For attendees traveling to Atlanta from elsewhere, housing (group rate) is available at the conference hotel for $169/night. The deadline for reserving hotel rooms at the group rate is April 25, 2017. Information for making housing arrangements is available in the “Lodging” tab on the workshop website.

Keynote speakers
Michael Brecht (Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin)
Nicholas Hatsopoulos (University of Chicago)
Mackenzie Mathis (Harvard University, Universität Tübingen)
Leslie Osborne (University of Chicago)
Carl Petersen (EPFL Lausanne)
Jennifer Raymond (Stanford University)
Reza Shadmehr (Johns Hopkins University)

Local speakers
Don Edwards (Georgia State University)
David Hofmann (Emory University)
Dieter Jaeger (Emory University)
Ilya Nemenman (Emory University)
Chethan Pandarinath (Emory University/Georgia Tech)
Sam Sober (Emory University)
Simon Sponberg (Emory University/Georgia Tech)
Lena Ting (Emory University/Georgia Tech)

Hands-on Tutorials
Tutorials will be held (concurrently) the morning of May 19. The registration site will allow you to select a tutorial to attend.

Information theoretic analysis of neural spike trains
led by Ilya Nemenman
Application of generalized linear models to spike trains
led by David Hofmann
Beyond Spikes: Insights from local field potential recordings in electrode array data
led by Audrey Sederberg
Quantitative behavioral analysis using dimensionality reduction
led by Gordon Berman


Looking forward to seeing you in May!

On behalf of the organizing committee,


David Hofmann  (Postdoctoral Fellow, Emory University Physics)
Sam Sober  (Assistant Professor of Biology, Emory University)
Simon Sponberg  (Assistant Professor of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology)