Seminars

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.

Merav Ahissar examines how expertise emerges through learning the statistics of task-relevant stimuli. Slow learning builds familiarity with stable regularities, such as syllable patterns in language, while fast adaptation supports flexible responses to changing situations, including surprising social interactions. The talk considers atypical learning dynamics in dyslexia and autism and how these may explain difficulties in linguistic and social skill acquisition, respectively. The discussion draws on Gertsovski and Ahissar, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2026. Speaker: Merav Ahissar, Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Organized by Cornell Cognitive Science. Friday 25 September 2026, 15:00–16:30 America/New_York (EDT). Attend online through the public Join via Zoom link on the official event page; the link opens Zoom’s app and browser join options. Cornell advertises the source event as hybrid, but this listing covers the verified online attendance route.

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.

Leonid Berlyand discusses mathematical models for the onset of cell motion driven by myosin contraction. A two-dimensional free-boundary PDE model links cell-shape evolution to diffusion and Keller–Segel-type transport. The talk examines linear stability, a stability-determining eigenvalue and the way nonlinear diffusion changes the bifurcation from supercritical to subcritical. It also considers the curvature of the bifurcation curve, connections to bistability, and the role of non-self-adjoint operators. An example illustrates why a spectral gap alone need not guarantee stability. This is an in-person Analysis of Fluids and Related Topics seminar at Princeton.

Meagan McManus examines mitochondrial dysfunction as an early driver of brain ageing and neurodegeneration. Reactive oxygen species and other mitochondrial stress signals connect impaired energy metabolism with glial activation. The talk presents preclinical evidence for [18F]ROStrace PET, a redox-sensitive tracer that crosses the blood–brain barrier, as a non-invasive way to detect mitochondrial and immune distress before overt pathology in models relevant to late-onset Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Online via the University of Arizona Zoom meeting. Use the Zoom link published on the organizer’s event page. Tuesday 22 September 2026, 16:00–17:00 MST (America/Phoenix; UTC−7). Organized by the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience and the Department of Neuroscience. This listing advertises the verified remote attendance option.

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.

This seminar discusses a proof-of-concept gravitational-waveform model described in arXiv:2511.10522. It augments post-Newtonian equations using physics-informed neural-network methods and universal differential equations. The talk also covers ongoing development of a precessing surrogate model designed to evaluate in less than one millisecond while covering a broader portion of the LVK frequency band.

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.

Kirk Public Lecture at the Isaac Newton Institute by Yoshiko Ogata (Kyoto University) on how macroscopic properties of matter emerge from quantum particle interactions and the classification of topological order from an operator-algebraic perspective in mathematical physics.

Luca Mrini presents work in progress on quantising singular configuration spaces using the non-smooth calculus of metric-measure spaces. The framework generalises smooth quantum mechanics through Hilbert spaces, position and momentum operators, Hamiltonians, unitary dynamics, and observable algebras. A method for bounding mass gaps after symplectic reduction uses the curvature of the unreduced configuration space. Examples include the harmonic oscillator constrained to zero angular momentum, lattice Yang–Mills theory, and fractional-dimensional Laakso spaces. The talk closes with prospective applications to the Yang–Mills mass-gap problem and quantum gravity.

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.

Isaac Newton Institute seminar in the 'Mathematics of many-body entanglement' (MMB) programme: Ignacio Cirac of the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik speaks on the preparation of tensor network states.

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.

Stanford's summer research symposium features a keynote by Jamie Zeitzer, undergraduate lightning talks, and a poster and demonstration session on human performance research.

Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology Seminar by Christine Brown, PhD (Deputy Director, T Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratories) on developing and refining redirected CAR T cells for malignant brain tumors, including glioblastoma, tumor heterogeneity, immunosuppressive microenvironments, delivery routes, and manufacturing.

Special seminar at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory with neuroscientist Hee-Sup Shin, MD, PhD, of the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), held in the Picower Seminar Room (46-3310) at 43 Vassar Street.

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.