Welcome
Dear Investigators,
We are very excited to gather everyone together in person for our first Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain annual meeting since the COVID-19 pandemic began. 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 back to in-person 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 strive to continue to facilitate deep and insightful collaborations among our Investigators. 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. By thinking together and working together, SCGB Investigators are making great progress in understanding the neural computations underlying cognition.
We also seek to train and support the next generations of systems and computational neuroscientists focused on understanding neural coding and dynamics at the single-cell level. We’ve made investments in junior faculty through the new Independence Awards and are introducing talented undergraduates to the field through our new SCGB Undergraduate Research Awards. 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 virtual collaboration-wide global meeting. These meetings provide useful feedback to junior researchers sharing their work and create a network of early career collaborators.
We continue to fund courses organized and taught by SCGB Investigators across the globe: Romania, China, the United States, Israel/Palestine and South Africa. The IBRO-Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo in South Africa focuses on purely computational training while also promoting computational neuroscience in Africa. The Neurobridges course focuses on the neural basis of decision-making in sensory-motor tasks while also bringing together Mediterranean and Middle Eastern scientists to promote international scientific cooperation among young researchers from Israel and Palestine. We are extremely proud of the diversity of courses and the global and collaborative community the SCGB is building.
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, Scientist, SCGB
Kelsey Martin, Director, SFARI and Neuroscience Collaborations
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
