JAMES W GNADT
$18,000
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
New York
National Eye Institute (NEI)
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Conference on Neuronal Circuits MARCH 16 – 19, 2022 Project Summary This proposal seeks support for the meeting on “Neuronal Circuits” to be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory March 16 – 19, 2022. The meeting will assemble leaders in the field, together with junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students, that represent the diversity of the scientific community, including underrepresented individuals. The participants will discuss the latest advances that analyze the organization and function of nervous systems on the level of neuronal circuits in a variety of systems and species. The remarkable computational capacity of neuronal circuits remains a major unresolved problem in biology, serving as the core substrate linking genes and behavior. We believe that the magnitude of this problem requires communal efforts among scientists working on different organisms and systems. Creating such synergy served as a motivation for starting this biannual meeting series. Almost two decades later, this meeting has emerged as a well-established and highly regarded forum for the neuroscience community, which has an unusual inter-species flavor and focus on circuit structure and function. By its very nature, research presented in the meeting is highly interdisciplinary as it brings together experimentalists, theorists, and researchers from a range of quantitative disciplines. The 2022 meeting relies on the notion that behavior is the essential and ultimate output of the cognitive and computational processes in neuronal circuits. Sessions are therefore organized around different aspects of cognition and behavior and their neuronal representations, including topics on decision-making, navigation, vocal communication, motor learning, and social interactions. Further sessions on circuit plasticity and the newest approaches to investigate large-scale neural coding will round up the program. Each session will be chaired by a leading scientist in the field. Oral presentations will be given by distinguished invited speakers, pairing established investigators with talented junior faculty that are rising stars of their sub-disciplines, as well as by speakers selected from submitted abstracts by a steering committee comprised of the invited speakers. Selected speakers will include graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty, with the aim of maximal inclusion of young investigators and under-represented individuals. Of special importance are the two poster sessions, where many participants can present their work in an atmosphere conducive to informal discussion. The meeting will be of moderate size and we expect about 250 people to attend, the vast majority of whom will be presenting a poster or talk. To account for the remaining uncertainties of the current COVID-19 pandemic and eventual travel restrictions that might still apply in 2022 in some countries, the oral sessions will be made available online and a certain contingent of registrants can sign-up for a virtual version of the meeting.