Transatlantic Behavioral Neuroscience Summer School 2023

Sept 18-29th 2023, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The field of behavioral neuroscience is changing.

These rapid changes are visible in the conceptual framing of the field. We no longer see brain and behavior as independent but rather we are trying to put them in the context of the whole organism, its needs, natural environment and evolution.

This change would not be possible without the racent explosion of new tools. With stunning precision we can record both the behavior and neuronal activity of an animal performing various complex tasks.

Most importantly, the tool-revolution has an open and worldwide character – the field of behavioral neuroscience is being democratized. The exploration of new ideas finally depends more on the scientific question and less on the available resources.

Our second edition of Transatlantic Behavioral Neuroscience Summer School is designed to embrace and foster these changes and will interweave three themes: concepts, tools and diversity.

Concepts

The school will be a floor for discussion about the ideas in behavioral neuroscience. We are inviting scientists who guide the conceptual revolution in their fields by developing or taking advantage of new tools, by shifting research to new animal models, and by asking questions that are putting brain and behavior in different contexts. We believe that to stimulate a new wave of innovation we must participate in a diversified conceptual debate.

Tools

We want to show you how those broader ideas can be turned into specific experimental work. TBNSS is composed of intense, hands-on tutorials on behavioral experiment design and data analysis. By choosing a relatively simple behavior for our student project – phototaxis in fruit flies – during our school we will go in detail through all the scientific steps of verifying a hypothesis.

During the tutorials you will learn how to design and built a setup for fruit flies using 3D printing. We will introduce the concepts of basic electronics which will allow you to control the setups by  adding visual and mechanical stimuli, as well as open open tools like Arduino and Bonsai to conduct closed-loop experiments. These experiments will provide data for more complex offline analysis using machine learning tools like DeepLabCut. Finally, we will focus on data presentation and communication.

These tutorials have been designed in a way to show the diverse applications of open-science tools to study both brain and behavior. We want to give you the knowledge to modify and improve your own setups and remove obstacles when designing future experiments.

Diversity

Neuroscience needs ideas – it is often said – but there are no ideas without diversity. We believe that for too long our field was listening to a very limited number of voices. We want to encourage people from different regions and backgrounds to take part in our endeavor and to express their ideas freely. We want our school to result in a melting pot of approaches behaviour, and to allow lesser-known frameworks to be discovered and discussed.

Our confirmed guests (as of today) are:

  • Antonia Marin Burgin (IBioBA)
  • Jakob Voigts (Janelia Research Campus)
  • Inés Samengo (Instituto Balseiro)
  • Ofer Yizhar (Weizmann Instiute)
  • Ewelina Knapska (Nencki Institute)
  • Daniel Tomsic (University of Buenos Aires)

TA’s: Alejandro Cámera, Anna Chrzanowska, Konrad Danielewski, Lautaro Duarte, Verónica de la Fuente, Ludwika Kondrakiewicz, Mateusz Kostecki, Azul Silva, Justyna Wiśniewska, Urszula Włodkowska

Where, when and how

The school will be organized on Sep 18-29th 2023 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The fee is EUR 450. We are securing funds for fee waivers, please specify in the registration form if you need one.

You can find the application form here. The deadline for application is April 1st 2023. We will let you know about the results of your application before April 23rd.. If you have any questions, contact us at openlab@nencki.edu.pl