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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MIT researchers and students are invited to two talks on emerging applications of ultrasound for non-invasive brain imaging, neural modulation and wearable human-machine interaction.

Two talks present emerging applications of ultrasound technology in neuroscience, spanning brain imaging and human-machine interaction. The in-person seminar is open to MIT researchers, students, and staff and is supported by the MIT School of Science and the Feng Lab at the McGovern Institute.

Arterial spin labeling (ASL) MRI has become a vital tool in clinical neuroimaging, enabling noninvasive assessment of cerebral perfusion across a range of conditions including stroke, vascular malformations, and brain tumors. With broader clinical adoption, its practical strengths — as well as important limitations — have become increasingly clear.

Sharan Banagiri uses gravitational-wave observations to investigate how stellar-mass binary black holes form. The first part of the fourth LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA observing run more than doubled the number of detections, revealing new population features and clarifying earlier ones. The talk surveys notable and puzzling subpopulations, relates them to formation channels, and connects the evidence with transient phenomena and compact-object astrophysics. As the sample grows, these identifiable subpopulations can support a broader physical account of binary black-hole formation.

1. Can we reconstruct images that a person saw, directly from their fMRI brain recordings? 2. Can we reconstruct the training data that a deep-network trained on, directly from the parameters of the network? The answer to both of these intriguing questions is “Yes!” In this talk I will present some of our work in both domains. I will then show how combining the power of Brains and Machines can lead to significant breakthroughs in both areas, and potentially bridge the gap between Minds and Machines. Finally, I will show how combining the power of Multiple Brains (with NO shared data) may lead to new breakthrough discoveries in Brain-Science, and allow mapping of information between different brains. Presented in the van Vreeswijk Theoretical Neuroscience Seminar series (formerly WWTNS) on 2026-02-18. Recording duration: 00:50:24.

Over the last 20 years, neuroimaging and electrophysiology techniques have become central to understanding the mechanisms that accompany loss and recovery of consciousness. Much of this research is performed in the context of healthy individuals with neurotypical brain dynamics. Yet, a true understanding of how consciousness emerges from the joint action of neurons has to account for how severely pathological brains, often showing phenotypes typical of unconsciousness, can nonetheless generate a subjective viewpoint. In this presentation, I will start from the context of Disorders of Consciousness and will discuss recent work aimed at finding generalizable signatures of consciousness that are reliable across a spectrum of brain electrophysiological phenotypes focusing in particular on the notion of edge-of-chaos criticality.

Predictive processing offers a unifying view of neural computation, proposing that brains continuously anticipate sensory input and update internal models based on prediction errors. In this talk, I will present converging evidence for the computational mechanisms underlying this framework across human neuroscience and deep neural networks. I will begin with recent work showing that large-scale distributed prediction-error encoding in the human brain directly predicts how sensory representations reorganize through predictive learning. I will then turn to PredNet, a popular predictive coding inspired deep network that has been widely used to model real-world biological vision systems. Using dynamic stimuli generated with our Spatiotemporal Style Transfer algorithm, we demonstrate that PredNet relies primarily on low-level spatiotemporal structure and remains insensitive to high-level content, revealing limits in its generalization capacity. Finally, I will discuss new recurrent vision models that integrate top-down feedback connections with intrinsic neural variability, uncovering a dual mechanism for robust sensory coding in which neural variability decorrelates unit responses, while top-down feedback stabilizes network dynamics. Together, these results outline how prediction error signaling and top-down feedback pathways shape adaptive sensory processing in biological and artificial systems.

The cortex comprises many neuronal types, which can be distinguished by their transcriptomes: the sets of genes they express. Little is known about the in vivo activity of these cell types, particularly as regards the structure of their spike trains, which might provide clues to cortical circuit function. To address this question, we used Neuropixels electrodes to record layer 5 excitatory populations in mouse V1, then transcriptomically identified the recorded cell types. To do so, we performed a subsequent recording of the same cells using 2-photon (2p) calcium imaging, identifying neurons between the two recording modalities by fingerprinting their responses to a “zebra noise” stimulus and estimating the path of the electrode through the 2p stack with a probabilistic method. We then cut brain slices and performed in situ transcriptomics to localize ~300 genes using coppaFISH3d, a new open source method, and aligned the transcriptomic data to the 2p stack. Analysis of the data is ongoing, and suggests substantial differences in spike time coordination between ET and IT neurons, as well as between transcriptomic subtypes of both these excitatory types.

Functional connectomics reveals general wiring rule in mouse visual cortex

Applications are invited for our third edition of Systems Vision Science (SVS) summer school since 2023, designed for everyone interested in gaining a systems level understanding of biological vision. We plan a coherent, graduate-level, syllabus on the integration of experimental data with theory and models, featuring lectures, guided exercises and discussion sessions. The summer school will end with a Systems Vision Science symposium on frontier topics on August 20-22, with additional invited and contributed presentations and posters. Call for contributions and participations to the symposium will be sent out spring of 2025. All summer school participants are invited to attend, and welcome to submit contributions to the symposium.