2021 Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (SCGB) Annual Meeting

America/New_York
Hybrid

Hybrid

Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium 160 Fifth Ave, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10010
Description

Postponment


Dear SCGB Investigators, Fellows, and Guests - 

Given recent heightened uncertainty around the pandemic, combined with the desire to prioritize in-person interactions in our community, we made the difficult decision to postpone the 2021 SCGB Annual Meeting scheduled for September 17-19.  

The meeting will now be held March 6-8, 2022.  Please mark your calendars.  We will be in touch closer to the date with more information.  

If you have already booked travel, someone from the team will reach out to cancel those arrangements.  

We hope you see you all in person as soon as possible.

Best,
David Tank, SCGB Director
Alyssa Picchini Schaffer, Senior Scientist and Administrative Director, Neuroscience Collaborations
Laura Long, Assistant Scientist, SCGB


Welcome



Dear Investigators,

We are very excited to gather everyone together, both in person and virtually, for our first hybrid Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain annual meeting.

Through this roller coaster of a year, the SCGB has adapted to the changing needs of our scientific community. We transitioned our workshops and meetings to virtual formats and are now shifting to hybrid meetings (like this annual meeting) as public health conditions allow. We’ve extended research and fellowship awards with an extra year of funding, responding to the stresses placed on labs and projects due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve made investments in junior faculty through the new Bridge to Independence Awards and are growing the field of systems and computational neuroscience through our new SCGB Undergraduate Research Awards.

We hope not only to train and support the next generations of scientists, but also to lay the groundwork for deep and insightful collaborations at the Principal Investigator level. Toward this goal, we continue to make our postdoctoral programming an integral part of the scientific landscape for junior SCGB researchers through regular postdoc meetings in New York, California, Boston and a new collaboration-wide global meeting. These meetings provide useful feedback to junior researchers sharing their work and create a network of early career collaborators.

Importantly, we’ve kept our scientific focus on expanding our understanding of the role of internal brain processes in the arc from sensation to action, thereby discovering the nature, role and mechanisms of the neural activity that produces cognition. Our new Pilot Awards further push the cutting edge of the field with a focus on how neural coding and dynamics in multiple brain regions work together to produce cognition. By thinking together and working together, SCGB Investigators are making great progress in understanding the neural computations underlying cognition.

We continue to fund courses organized and taught by SCGB Investigators to train and engage the next generation of systems and computational neuroscientists. We have funded courses in Romania, China, the United States, Israel/Palestine and South Africa, in an effort to educate students around the globe. We are extremely proud of the diversity of courses and the global and collaborative community the SCGB is building. From courses that focus on purely computational training provided by the IBRO-Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo in South Africa while also promoting computational neuroscience in Africa, to courses on the neural basis underlying decision-making in sensory-motor tasks, while also bringing together Mediterranean and Middle Eastern scientists in order to promote international scientific cooperation among young researchers from these countries.

We hope this meeting will continue to foster collaboration and discussion on work vital to the SCGB mission. Thank you for contributing your time and expertise to these efforts.

David Tank, SCGB Director
Alyssa Picchini Schaffer, Senior Scientist and Administrative Director, Neuroscience Collaborations
Laura Long, Assistant Scientist, SCGB
Gerry Fischbach, Distinguished Scientist, Simons Foundation
Larry Abbott, SCGB Executive Committee
Anne Churchland, SCGB Executive Committee
Marlene Cohen, SCGB Executive Committee
Adrienne Fairhall, SCGB Executive Committee
Tony Movshon, SCGB Executive Committee
Bill Newsome, SCGB Executive Committee

    • Day One

      Friday, January 29th

      • 4:00 PM
        Welcome Reception Roof (Flatiron Institute)

        Roof

        Flatiron Institute

        162 Fifth Avenue
      • 1
        Keynote Session
      • 6:30 PM
        Dinner TBD

        TBD

    • 9:00 AM
      Breakfast Roof (Flatiron Institute)

      Roof

      Flatiron Institute

      162 Fifth Avenue
    • Opening Remarks

      Jim Simons, Chairman, Simons Foundation
      David Tank, Director, Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain
      Gerry Fischbach, Distinguished Scientist and Fellow, Simons Foundation

    • Session 1
    • 11:00 AM
      Coffee Break
    • Session 2
    • 12:20 PM
      Lunch Roof (Flatiron Institute)

      Roof

      Flatiron Institute

      162 Fifth Avenue
    • Session 3
    • Interim Remarks
    • 3:30 PM
      Poster Session
    • 6:00 PM
      Reception
    • 7:00 PM
      Dinner TBD

      TBD

    • 9:00 AM
      Breakfast Roof (Flatiron Institute)

      Roof

      Flatiron Institute

      162 Fifth Avenue
    • Session 4
    • 11:00 AM
      Coffee Break
    • Session 5
    • 12:20 PM
      Lunch Roof (Flatiron Institute)

      Roof

      Flatiron Institute

      162 Fifth Avenue
    • Session 6
    • Closing Remarks
    • 3:30 PM
      Poster Session