Neuroscience seminars

Brain metabolism supplies the energy underlying brain injury, recovery and aging. This webinar brings together three complementary approaches to understanding how repetitive mild traumatic brain injury affects these processes. Sakthivel Ravi examines repetitive mild TBI and aging through multimodal imaging and molecular profiling. Adam Khalifa presents wireless brain glucose sensing for TBI research, and Joe Abisambra discusses disruption of bioenergetic pathways following repetitive mild TBI. The talks are followed by a moderated question-and-answer discussion.

Shantanu Jadhav presents work on coordinated hippocampal-prefrontal activity and the neural mechanisms that support memory-guided cognition and decisions. The seminar draws on systems electrophysiology and circuit analysis to connect distributed network dynamics with behavior.

Matthew J. Girgenti discusses how research on individual brain cells and the three-dimensional organization of DNA is changing the biological understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. The seminar examines how these approaches reveal trauma-associated brain changes and identify possible targets for more effective, personalized treatments. Girgenti is a neuroscientist in Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. Jeffrey Borenstein moderates this Meet the Scientist session. Online via the BBRF Zoom webinar. Tuesday 13 October 2026, 14:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Follow Register Today on the organizer’s event page to the event-specific Zoom form. Advance registration is available to researchers, students, healthcare providers, mental-health organizations, patients and family members.

Gašper Tkačik explores whether the language of information in biology can become a predictive scientific theory. The lecture connects information transfer from DNA to proteins, positional signals that guide cell fate during development, neural information processing, and the storage and inheritance of information in evolving genomes. It brings physics, information theory and quantitative biology together to examine these processes across biological scales. Tkačik is Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Shinya Kuroda provides commentary; Arisa Ema moderates. Online via Zoom Webinar. Wednesday 14 October 2026, 14:00–15:00 JST (Asia/Tokyo; UTC+9). Public advance registration is required through the organizer’s event page. The lecture is in English with Japanese interpretation. Organized by Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study.

Arno Onken examines transformer models for predicting responses in the retina and visual cortex. These models learn complex neural-response patterns from large datasets and can transfer learned representations between settings, but fitting and interpreting them differs from linear–nonlinear and convolutional approaches. The talk discusses the opportunities and difficulties this creates for understanding sensory processing. It includes ViV1T, a transformer trained on natural movies that revealed previously uncharacterised response properties in mouse primary visual cortex. The work illustrates how predictive models can generate hypotheses and guide animal experiments. Onken also considers the substantial data and computing requirements and the difficulty of interpreting what the models have learned.

Tatsuya Osaki examines vascular contributions to autism spectrum disorder, focusing on blood–brain barrier integrity and cerebral blood-flow dynamics during early development. Rett syndrome provides a starting point: MeCP2 mutations impair endothelial function, suggesting that vascular cells themselves contribute to disease mechanisms. A three-dimensional microphysiological model built from human induced pluripotent stem cells recreates blood–brain barrier structure and function. Patient-derived endothelial cells form perfusable microvascular networks but show impaired barrier function, a finding independently corroborated in MeCP2-knockout mice. Transcriptomic analyses implicate increased miR-126 expression and disrupted tight junctions; inhibiting miR-126-3p restores barrier function and identifies a potential therapeutic target. The work is extending to hemodynamic changes in other autism subtypes, with two-photon imaging providing in-vivo cross-validation, to identify shared neurovascular mechanisms and candidate interventions.

Vinod Menon examines the brain's default mode network as a foundation for autobiographical memory, self-related processing, and consciousness, and considers how these functions compare with current artificial intelligence systems. The virtual session is part of Stanford's Contemplation by Design Summit.

Ta-Wei Guu examines whether continuous data from wearable devices can reveal aspects of older adults’ depression and dementia that conventional clinical assessments miss. The session covers behavioural patterns, sleep disruption and treatment responses measured outside clinical settings, and considers how repeated observations can track changes in health over time. Guu also presents plans for a technology-enabled longitudinal cohort to study ageing populations over months and years, discussing how the resulting patterns could inform research and clinical practice. The session includes questions and discussion. Guu is an assistant professor and consultant psychiatrist at CMUBH in Taiwan, with an affiliation to King’s College London. Online via Dementia Researcher Communities livestream. Wednesday 21 October 2026, 12:00–12:45 BST (Europe/London; UTC+1). This free event requires a Dementia Researcher Communities account: open the event page, sign in or create an account, and RSVP to access the livestream. Organized by Dementia Researcher, delivered by University College London.

This research webinar examines how neuroscience and settlement research explain refugee trauma, mental health and recovery after resettlement. Belinda Liddell discusses neuroimaging evidence on the effects of visa insecurity, family separation, discrimination and social exclusion on brain function, trauma recovery and psychological wellbeing. The biological consequences of uncertainty are considered alongside implications for interventions and refugee mental health care. Tahereh Ziaian presents an international study of refugee and migrant youth in Australia, Canada and the United States. It identifies factors supporting settlement, social inclusion, wellbeing and lasting integration, with recommendations for policies, services and family support. A moderated expert panel connects these findings to trauma-informed clinical practice, settlement services and policy. The webinar is free.

How can memories remain durable while adapting to new situations? Gisella Vetere examines how the neuronal ensembles encoding a memory change between initial learning and later recall, and how their reorganization across brain networks supports both precise recollection and generalization. Her research combines activity-dependent cell tagging, interventions in neural circuits and analyses across the brain to investigate these transformations. The talk considers how changes in memory representations influence flexible behavior, including circumstances in which that flexibility becomes maladaptive.

Richard L. Huganir discusses research on the molecular mechanisms that regulate glutamate receptors, the brain's major excitatory neurotransmitter receptors, and thereby modulate communication between neurons.

Emily Jacobs will examine how endocrine transitions such as the circadian cycle, menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause reshape the human brain. The talk combines precision brain imaging with a review of research, policy, and funding efforts intended to close persistent gaps in women's brain-health evidence.

Reproducible research can turn scientific observations into reliable, reusable knowledge. This talk presents ReproNim and related community infrastructure for sharing data and computational workflows. It examines versioned, re-executable analysis at scale using OpenNeuro, together with harmonization and querying across dozens of research sites. ReproLakes and ReproPonds combine public and private metadata stores with FAIR and reproducible practices to improve discovery and reuse. The discussion addresses both technical obstacles and research-culture challenges, offering practical approaches for making shared scientific resources more useful and accelerating cumulative discovery.

Chaoyi Zhang presents a method for observing distributed social-brain networks in awake marmosets during natural social interaction. Prefrontal, cingulate, striatal, thalamic and amygdala circuits are implicated in autism and other neuropsychiatric conditions, but have rarely been measured together during genuine primate social behavior. The platform replaces part of the skull with an acoustically transparent implant, enabling volumetric functional ultrasound measurements of cortical and subcortical activity at approximately 150-micrometre resolution. A whole-brain vascular reference and automated registration permit comparisons across roughly 50 atlas-defined regions, sessions and animals. Experiments show that a live social partner produces stronger and more extensive activity than video of the same partner. The talk considers applying this approach to genetically tractable, transgenic marmoset models of autism risk genes to identify altered network signatures and evaluate their potential as circuit-level biomarkers.

Why do dorsal raphe serotonin neurons respond to reward, surprise, salience and uncertainty in ways that resist a single explanation? This talk proposes that serotonin activity encodes prospective value: a prediction of cumulative future reward. The model is motivated by the unusually strong and persistent spike-frequency adaptation of these neurons, which may support efficient and accurate predictions. It reproduces important qualitative features of serotonergic responses that earlier models miss and predicts measured in vivo firing rates more accurately than competing accounts. By treating previously separate responses as manifestations of one prospective value code, the work connects serotonin physiology to its computational roles in learning and behaviour.

Cagla Eroglu presents research on how astrocytes regulate synaptic connectivity during development, function and plasticity. The seminar examines molecular and cellular mechanisms that shape neural circuits using imaging, mouse models and complementary experimental approaches.

The brain adjusts its internal activity to direct visual and auditory attention and regulate responses to external stimuli. Appropriate endogenous activity may support normal cognition and behaviour, while its modulation can also produce dysfunction. Beginning with mathematical models of general anaesthesia, this talk examines how changes in noisy endogenous activity can fragment functional brain organization and account for loss of consciousness. Anaesthesia experiments in ferrets support the theoretical result. Further experimental examples are discussed to show how underlying internal noise may help explain observed transitions between brain states.

Kuan Hong Wang examines how dopaminergic, cannabinoid, and neuroimmune signaling regulate circuit plasticity across development, experience, and disease, and how cross-species work may inform selective therapies.

John N. Constantino and Jeffrey Borenstein examine how individualized education planning can support children with developmental, behavioral and mental-health challenges. Educators and counselors often recognize difficulties early, and the extensive time children spend at school offers a major opportunity to support maturation alongside clinical care. The discussion explores the complexities of individualized education plans and how educators and clinicians can apply precision-medicine approaches to tailor them to each child, making everyday school experiences more effective for development and adaptation.