Topic: training

Supports collaborative capabilities that advance research on health and disease: shared resources, data/software platforms, interdisciplinary partnerships, and training. Awards last up to five years and are expected to start nine to eighteen months after submission. Primary research projects, infrastructure-only proposals, new studentships and fellowships are excluded. Applicants may lead only one application at a time across MRC applicant-led research, partnership and new-investigator routes. Uninvited resubmissions of unsuccessful applications submitted after 1 April 2026 are excluded.

Recognises sustained excellence and influence in Canadian natural sciences or engineering, including research, training and mentorship. Research support is up to CAD 1 million over five years. Nominations close 30 November 2026 before 20:00 Eastern Time.

The brain and its inherent functions can be modified by various forms of learning. Learning-induced changes are seen even in basic perceptual functions. In particular, repeated training in a perceptual task can lead to a significant improvement in the trained task—a phenomenon known as perceptual learning. There has been a long-standing debate about the mechanisms of perceptual learning. In this talk, I will present results from our series of electrophysiological studies. These studies have consistently shown that perceptual learning is mediated by concerted changes in both perceptual and cogn

The brain has a hugely diverse and heterogeneous nature. The exact role of heterogeneity has been relatively little explored as most neural models tend to be largely homogeneous. We trained spiking neural networks with varying degrees of heterogeneity on complex real-world tasks and found that heterogeneity resulted in more stable and robust training and improved training performance, especially for tasks with a higher temporal structure. Moreover, the optimal distribution of parameters found by training was found to be similar to experimental observations. These findings suggest that heteroge