Seminars

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.

Real-time measurement of local biomolecule concentrations in living tissue requires sensors that are stable, selective and minimally invasive. This seminar examines single-walled carbon nanotubes, whose durable near-infrared fluorescence and sensitivity to their surroundings support optical biosensing. Biopolymer functionalization gives the nanotubes biological compatibility and selectivity for particular molecular targets. Spectroscopy, microscopy and machine-learning-assisted analysis are used to characterize sensor interactions and extract biological information, with applications spanning live-cell imaging, wearable sensing and continuous monitoring.

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.

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.

Navigation and memory require coordination between map-like allocentric representations and body-centered egocentric actions. Aaron Wilber examines how the parietal–retrosplenial–anterior thalamic–hippocampal network performs these transformations, and how disrupted coordination contributes to spatial deficits in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Rat sequence-task experiments reveal bidirectional hippocampal–parietal interactions across route-centered, place and egocentric representations. Because that task does not isolate reference-frame use, the laboratory developed a freely available task separating egocentric, allocentric and transformation conditions. Validation indicates that parietal cortex and anterior thalamus are required for transformation; ongoing work examines population states associated with each condition. The talk then connects impaired hippocampal–cortical communication during sleep to navigation deficits in 3xTg-AD mice, reporting recovery of circuit function and cognition after early, circuit-targeted 40 Hz entrainment. Related investigations examine this network during waking navigation. In TgF344-AD rats, egocentric impairments appear before transformation deficits, addressing the shortage of rodent studies of reference-frame coordination in Alzheimer’s disease.

How do humans stabilize an inverted pendulum, and why does a balanced pole eventually fall? Drawing on 25 years of fingertip pole-balancing research, this talk examines neural correction delays: longer poles move more slowly relative to the nervous system’s response time. Delay-differential models can stabilize the upright position, yet skilled people still experience falls. The proposed explanation is microchaos arising from interactions among delay, sensory dead zones and frequency-dependent force encoding. A region of transient falling solutions lies next to stable microchaotic dynamics. Such microchaos is absent in virtual frontal-plane balancing tasks, while models of standing postural sway lack the corresponding transient regime. The comparison suggests that human falls, unlike pole falls, are more plausibly associated with medical events or slips and trips.

To orchestrate complex behaviors in mammals, the cerebral cortex must continuously transmit its processing results to subcortical regions. While internal cortical processing relies on highly selective sparse codes, these descending cortical output streams employ an enigmatic dense code, characterized by high firing rates and low feature selectivity. This dense population code presents a profound paradox: how can downstream regions extract precise, cognitively relevant signals when most cortical output neurons can be active at any moment? We address this paradox by testing the hypothesis that cortex does not lose information when switching to a dense code. Instead, it utilizes a mechanism for sparse-to-dense coding transformations discovered by my laboratory: thalamocortical synapses target specifically the dendritic initiation zone for calcium action potentials (APs), which enables cortical output neurons to transmit multiple information streams simultaneously via a multiplexed 1-2-3 AP syntax. I will provide first evidence that this remarkable synaptic specificity and coding syntax generalize across long-range pathways. Information coupling via an anatomically and biophysically distinct dendritic nexus may hence be a ubiquitous mechanism for sparse-to-dense coding transformations in cortex. Dissecting these mechanistic origins of cortical output streams is only now possible due to a unique in vivo – in silico approach, perfected over two decades, that my laboratory developed for bridging the gaps between dendritic and population-level computations

Scott J. Russo examines how chronic psychosocial stress alters communication between the immune system and the brain in depression and anxiety. Human observations and mouse experiments connect persistent increases in circulating monocytes and inflammatory signals with stress-related illness. The talk describes stress-responsive neurons that project to bone marrow and regulate monocyte production, release and trafficking. It also considers how stress disrupts the blood–brain barrier, allowing peripheral inflammatory proteins to affect reward regions such as the nucleus accumbens. Together, these findings examine how peripheral immune cells act at the neurovascular interface to change brain circuits and behaviour, providing potential mechanisms relevant to treatment-resistant mood disorders. Online via Rutgers Brain Health Institute Zoom. Thursday 1 October 2026, 12:00–13:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Open the organizer’s event page and follow its Zoom link; the meeting ID and passcode are supplied there. Hosted by Yong Kim as part of the BHI Plenary Seminar Series. This listing advertises the verified remote option.

Vanessa Siffredi explores why the corpus callosum is central to typical brain development, yet some children born without it or with callosal abnormalities develop comparably to their peers. The talk connects callosal structure and communication between hemispheres with cognition, attention, executive function, memory, language and socio-emotional development. Structural and functional neuroimaging studies of typical development and callosal dysgenesis examine how developing brains compensate for alterations in this major white-matter pathway. Siffredi is affiliated with CHUV and UNIL; Carole Guedj chairs the seminar. Hybrid: Auditoire de pédiatrie Fred Bamatter, HUG, Hôpital des Enfants, Geneva; online via Zoom. Tuesday 29 September 2026, 09:30–10:30 CEST (Europe/Zurich; UTC+2), followed by CIBM news and networking until 11:00. Organized by CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging — Breakfast and Science. In-person attendance is free without registration. Remote attendees must register through the Zoom link on the event page and select the 29 September occurrence.

Mark Harnett presents work on how synaptic organization, nonlinear dendritic processing, and neuronal activity patterns interact to support computation, flexibility, and learning in the adult mammalian neocortex. The Brain and Cognitive Sciences colloquium is followed by a reception.

Bowen Li explains how ionizable lipids are designed for lipid nanoparticles that deliver messenger RNA. The seminar covers combinatorial and machine-learning-guided design, four-component reactions for rapidly producing lipid libraries, and barcoded screening in living systems to identify formulations targeting organs and cells, including lungs, T cells and tumours. It then examines applications of AI-guided nanoparticle platforms to mRNA therapeutics. Li is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto's Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. Online via Zoom. Thursday 24 September 2026, 11:00–12:00 Eastern Daylight Time (America/New_York; UTC−4). Use Join via Zoom on Western University's event page. The stated audience includes researchers, students, alumni and the general public. Organized by Western University's Western Bioinformatics Research Seminar.

Z Yan Wang presents comparative neuroscience research on the brains and behaviors of octopuses and bumblebees to illuminate life-history processes. The talk is part of Columbia's Tuesdays@10 neuroscience seminar program for researchers across fields and career stages.

Bryce Mander presents research on early sleep biomarkers associated with Alzheimer's disease pathophysiology and memory impairment. The William C. Dement Seminar connects sleep and circadian neuroscience with neurodegeneration, cognition and clinically relevant approaches to detecting disease-related change.

Rani Borbara presents brain-wide recordings from more than 150 freely moving C. elegans to examine how anatomical connectivity becomes functional organization during behavior. Cross-animal models map cell-class conditional dependencies and test how synapses, gap junctions, neuromodulation and shared brain states shape circuit dynamics.

Stanford Neurosciences Seminar Series talk by Emery Brown (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Neuroscience Statistics Research Lab) on deciphering the dynamics of the unconscious brain under general anesthesia, hosted by the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

Daphna Shohamy and Ashok Litwin-Kumar bridge experimental and computational neuroscience to explain how the brain assigns significance to memories, how dopamine shapes memory-guided decisions, and how bodily signals influence learning. Isabel Low moderates a public discussion and question session.

Yuko Munakata presents evidence challenging capacity-only accounts of self-control and explains how experience, effort, and expected payoff shape executive-function engagement and later outcomes.

Nick Turk-Browne presents research using infant functional MRI to investigate how the hippocampus supports learning and memory early in life. The seminar connects neural development, memory formation and infantile amnesia through new methods for studying awake infants.

Margaret Livingstone of Harvard Medical School presents in Princeton Neuroscience Institute's public seminar series. Livingstone's laboratory studies how visual recognition occurs in the primate brain using behavior, brain imaging, and electrophysiology.