Neuroscience seminars

This public discussion examines the factors that help preserve brain health during aging. Researchers working on neuroscience, brain stimulation, the microbiome and brain health consider how stress, everyday behavior and social and environmental conditions can affect resilience over a lifetime. The panel discusses emerging evidence about early vulnerability, possible interventions through lifestyle changes and stress management, and more targeted approaches. It also addresses the limits of current knowledge and the uncertainties that remain when translating these findings into ways to protect cognitive health.

Tom Nowakowski explains lineage barcoding and single-cell sequencing approaches for reconstructing neural stem-cell family trees and early wiring programs in developing mouse and human brains.

Lindsay N. Oberman reviews evidence for transcranial magnetic stimulation protocols in autism spectrum disorder. The seminar first explains how TMS works and how it can probe the brain mechanisms associated with autism. It then presents NIH research using repetitive TMS as an experimental therapeutic tool, examining its effects on both brain function and behaviour to guide the development of potential interventions. Online via Duke Zoom. Wednesday 7 October 2026, 16:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Register through the event-specific Register Here link on the Duke Autism Seminar Series page to receive remote access. The presentation will not be recorded. Accommodation requests should reach the organizer at least ten days before the event. The speaker directs NIMH’s Developmental Clinical Neurophysiology and Neurostimulation Research Program.

Junjie Guo investigates how an intronic nucleotide-repeat expansion in C9orf72 causes familial and some sporadic cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia. The talk presents progress in understanding how the expansion changes gene expression, alongside functional-genomics approaches that identify potential therapeutic targets controlling expression of the pathogenic mutation. It also considers which mechanisms and modifiers extend to other disease-causing repeat expansions. Guo is Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine; the seminar is hosted by J. Wren Kim. Online via CUNY ASRC Zoom. Thursday 8 October 2026, 12:00–13:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Follow the Zoom link on the official seminar page; meeting details are also supplied in its abstract PDF. Organized by the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, Neuroscience Initiative. This listing advertises remote attendance.

Takaki Komiyama will discuss how cortical circuits maintain information about the value of behavioral options across trials and transform past experience into future choices. The talk draws on longitudinal imaging and circuit manipulation in mice to examine distinct neuronal populations and local and long-range interactions in history-dependent decision-making.

Takaki Komiyama presents longitudinal imaging and circuit-manipulation studies of history-dependent decision-making. The work identifies retrosplenial-cortex populations and local and long-range interactions that maintain option values across trials, update them after outcomes and translate past experience into future choices.

Astrocytes help sustain neural signaling and tissue stability, but injury and implanted devices cause them to change their functions. Tim O'Shea examines how the extent and timing of this response determine tissue protection, regeneration and implant durability. Limited renewal of adult astrocytes contrasts with the greater proliferation and migration of immature cells in newborn mammals. Around implants, continuing movement, infection and other stimuli can prolong the response and affect device performance. The talk uses astrocyte-specific transcriptomic assays to investigate this reprogramming and considers how to improve repair without sacrificing normal astrocyte functions. It also presents biomaterial and cell-transplant approaches being studied in preclinical stroke, spinal cord injury and implant-response models.

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.

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.