Seminars

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anthony Letai discusses how understanding programmed cell death can guide the selection of cancer treatments. The seminar explains how apoptotic signalling can be measured and how these measurements can identify drugs capable of killing cancer cells. Hybrid: New Research Building Auditorium, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, and Zoom. Monday 5 October 2026, 16:30–17:30 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Use the attendance registration form or the event’s Zoom link on the organizer page. Organized by Georgetown’s Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series. Letai is Director of the National Cancer Institute. An in-person reception follows the seminar.

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.

Ivo D. Dinov examines augmented intelligence as a partnership between people and computational systems. The talk traces the technical and philosophical development of neural networks, then introduces complex-time, or kime, representations and the inference methods they support. Applications include medical imaging, healthcare and economic forecasting. It also considers the academic mission, societal consequences of AI and tensions between rapid technical development and human values, framing mathematical AI methods as extensions of human reasoning. Free hybrid seminar hosted by Wayne State University's Institute for AI and Data Science, AIDaS: CAD Seminar Series. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 14:30–15:30 EDT (America/Detroit; UTC−4). Attend in Room 1146, Faculty/Administration Building, 656 W. Kirby, Detroit, MI 48202, USA, or use the Zoom link on the official event page. Researchers, practitioners, students and faculty are welcome; the organizer encourages in-person attendance.

UCL Department of Neuroinflammation Seminar by Professor Emad Moeendarbary (Professor of Cell Mechanics and Mechanobiology, UCL Mechanical Engineering) on how biophysical factors such as substrate stiffness and axon geometry regulate oligodendrocyte behavior and myelin formation, presenting the AxoMetic in vitro myelination platform for discovery of remyelinating therapies.

Peter Meikle, Bernie Pope and Tingting Wang present the Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons (ACDC). Some heart attacks occur without established risk factors, and repeat events remain common despite optimal treatment. ACDC addresses this gap by securely pooling multi-omics, imaging and longitudinal outcomes from approximately 400,000 people in 18 Australian cohorts. The webinar explains cloud infrastructure, data harmonisation and federated standards based on Gen3; how integrated genomic, multi-omics and imaging cohorts support new risk markers and polygenic risk-score testing; and how the platform can move diagnostic research towards clinical practice. Meikle and Wang are at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute; Pope is at Australian BioCommons. Online via Zoom. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 12:00–13:00 AEST (Australia/Melbourne; UTC+10). Free, with advance registration through the official event page. Intended for life scientists, bioinformaticians, cardiovascular clinicians, data custodians and medical data scientists. Parts may be recorded; the Australian BioCommons Code of Conduct applies. Organized by Australian BioCommons.

Mansi Chhajed examines how the move from home sleep patterns to disrupted hospital sleep relates to cognitive outcomes after surgery. The session combines longitudinal sleep measurements with clinical assessments of postoperative delirium to identify baseline markers of vulnerability and consider practical ways to improve recovery. It connects sleep architecture, biological and environmental influences, and preoperative risk with proactive, sleep-informed patient care. Chhajed is a Clinical Research Coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital. Online via Zoom Webinar. Tuesday 29 September 2026 at 14:00 ET / 13:00 CT (America/New_York; EDT, UTC−4). Organized by the Sleep Research Society — Virtual Seminar Series. Follow Register Today on the organizer's page to the event-specific Zoom form, which requests name and email. The form is publicly accessible; advance registration supplies webinar access.

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.

Farhad Danesh examines how mitochondrial reactive oxygen species, altered metabolism and structural remodelling convert hyperglycaemia into progressive kidney injury. The seminar connects mitochondrial dynamics with diabetic microvascular damage, non-coding RNA regulation and experimental models that establish causal links to disease progression. Genome-wide CRISPR screens and spatial metabolomics reveal cellular gene-regulatory and metabolic changes. Integrating these approaches with molecular genetics, genomics and epigenomics, the work seeks therapeutic targets to prevent diabetic kidney disease progressing to kidney failure. Hybrid: New Research Building Auditorium, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, and Zoom. Thursday 24 September 2026, 16:00–17:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Use the public event registration form to arrange attendance, or follow its Zoom link for remote participation. Organized by Georgetown’s Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series. Danesh is Professor of Medicine and Chief of Nephrology at MD Anderson.

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.