Lectures

Albert and Ellen Grass Lecture: GINTY

Clinical Neuroscience Lecture: The Pathogenesis of Cerebral Small Vessel Disease and Vascular Cognitive Impairment — Anne Joutel

Cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) encompasses a heterogeneous group of diseases caused by in situ damages of small brain vessels commonly related to aging, hypertension or genetic factors. cSVD causes a quarter of all ischemic strokes, the majority of spontaneous hemorrhages and account for 20% or more of all dementia. The speaker will provide a comprehensive and critical appraisal of the biggest advances in our understanding of how cSVD affects the structure and function of small brain vessels, causes brain lesions and alters cognition.

David Kopf Lecture on Neuroethics

History of Neuroscience Lecture: The Troubled History of the Emotional Brain — Joseph E. LeDoux

As a young scientist in the young discipline of neuroscience I saw the dearth of emotion research in the field as low hanging fruit and submitted a proposal to NIH. The grant was rejected because “neuroscientists don’t study emotions.” Work that I and others did helped pave the way for a new neuroscience of emotion. But over time I came to believe much of the research was not about emotion itself, a problem than began with Darwin, and that later impaired efforts to treat mental disorders.

SfNova Lecture: Brandon J. Henderson and Jordan Squair

Special Lecture - Cross-Cutting 3 GAREL

Special Lecture - Straight Theme B NABEKURA

The speaker is a pioneer in studying theinteractions between microglia and neurons, particularly synapses, in livinganimals. To address the fundamental question of why microglial processesexhibit dynamic movements, he employed in vivo imaging to uncover phenomenasuch as the regulation of synaptic activity through microglial contact and therole of microglia in synapse formation in the cerebral cortex of immature mice.Furthermore, he discovered that interaction with microglial processes ininjured neurons decreases cell death caused by excessive activity.

Special Lecture - Straight Theme F BASSO

Special Lecture - Straight Theme H PAZ

Special Lecture: From Foraging to Flashbacks: The Neural Basis of Spatial Memory and Mental Time Travel — Nanthia Suthana

Memory enables both navigation and the mental reconstruction of past experiences, playing a crucial role in learning and decision-making. While generally adaptive, this process can become dysregulated, leading to intrusive flashbacks in post-traumatic stress disorder. This lecture will present findings from human intracranial recordings, focusing on the hippocampus and related regions, to reveal how neural activity during real-world navigation and memory recall underlies both memory function and its pathological disruptions.

Special Lecture: Learnt and Inbuilt Neural Control of Innate Behavioral Strategies — Sonja B. Hofer

To survive in evolving environments with uncertain resources and risks, animals need to dynamically adapt their behavior and exhibit flexibility in choosing appropriate strategies, such as staying safe from predators, exploring their environment or exploiting known resources. The lecture will explore how the brain implements and switches between such fundamental behavioral strategies, focusing on subcortical neural circuits for flexible behavioral control.

Special Lecture: Memories and Engrams in Mice — Sheena A. Josselyn

Memory may be defined as the retention over time of internal representations gained through experience, and the capacity to reconstruct these representations at later times. Long-lasting physical brain changes (‘engrams’) are thought to encode these internal representations. The speaker’s lab is interested in understanding how engrams may be formed, and how neuronal membership in an engram ensemble may change over time or with new experience. This lecture will describe data in their efforts to understand memories in mice and humans.

Special Lecture: Motor Cortex Circuits for Learned Movements — Takaki Komiyama

The brain refines its movement-generating circuit through motor learning. This lecture will explore neural circuit mechanisms underlying the generation of learned movements, focusing on the circuits centered around the primary motor cortex in mice. The lecture will also discuss synaptic plasticity rules that contribute to the refinement of the neural circuit for learned movements.

Special Lecture: Power Play: How the Immune, Endocrine, and Social Systems Collaborate to Sculpt Neural Development — Margaret M. McCarthy

Critical periods direct neural trajectories that diverge as a function of sex, endocrine status, metabolism or exposure to essential stimuli. Brain sexual differentiation is mediated by early life exposure to hormones, modified by immune cells and programs adolescent social play behavior thereby creating an additional critical window in that play deprivation dysregulates adult sociosexual behaviors. Other immune-defined epochs create a rich tapestry of interwoven and unique neurodevelopment. This Special Lecture will review known and new critical periods in the rodent brain

Special Lecture: Spying on Neuromodulator Dynamics In Vivo by Constructing Multi-Color Genetically-Encoded Sensors — Yulong Li

Neuromodulators are essential for brain functions such as perception, motion, learning and memory, and are implicated in neurological disorders. Understanding these processes requires real-time monitoring of neuromodulator dynamics. The speaker will introduce the development of multi-color GPCR-activation-based (GRAB) sensors with high spatiotemporal resolution and discuss how spectrally expanded sensors enable simultaneous detection of multiple neurochemicals in vivo in different animal models, offering new insights into the neuromodulatory system.

Special Lecture: The Brain-Immune Ecosystem: Immunotherapy Empowers the Immune System to Defeat Alzheimer’s Disease — Michal Schwartz

The lecture will cover the speaker's 25-year journey from concept to clinical application, including: The transformed understanding of brain-immune relationships; Peripheral immunity dysfunction as a catalyzer in brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease;. Immunotherapy that boosts systemic immunity by transiently blocking iinhibitory immune checkpoints restores brain immune support, mitigating inflammation, toxic protein buildup, senescent cells, and neuronal loss, thereby arresting cognitive decline

Special Lecture: Timing Mechanisms Linking Human Brain Development, Evolution, and Disease — Pierre P. Vanderhaeghen

The human cerebral cortex underwent rapid changes during recent hominid evolution, leading to the emergence of Homo Sapiens specialized cognitive and social skills. Here the speaker will discuss the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the evolution of cortical circuits, including human-specific gene regulatory programmes and species-specific cellular features such as metabolism. Human-specific modifiers of cortical neuron development and function shed light on human evolution, with unexpected links to brain diseases.

Special Lecture: Transmission of Misfolded Proteins in Neurodegenerative Disorders: A Common Mechanism of Disease Progression — Virginia M. Y. Lee

The formation of misfolded pathological protein aggregates by disease-specific proteins is a common feature of many neurodegenerative diseases and are believed to cause neuronal dysfunction directly or indirectly. We have developed in vivo transmission models oftauopathies, synucleinopathies and TDP-43 proteinopathies and have used them totest the “transmission” hypothesis and the “strain” hypothesis in order toelucidate mechanisms of progressive spread of NFTs, LBs and TDP-43 aggregates aswell as to explore the molecular basis of strain heterogeneity.

Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society

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Presidential Special Lecture: Cognition Emerges From Neural Dynamics — Earl K. Miller

Classic models likened brain function to neuron networks, like telegraphsystems. Emerging evidence, however, suggests higher cognition relies onrhythmic oscillations or "brain waves" at the electric field level.This expands functionality, with "telegraph wires" also producing"radio waves" (electric fields) that rapidly spread influence. Thesefields may facilitate large-scale organization, enabling executive control andenergy-efficient analog computing.

Presidential Special Lecture: The Importance of Synapses in Alzheimer's Disease — Tara Spires-Jones

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most pressing medical issues of our time. In this lecture, Tara Spires-Jones, DPhil, FMedSci discusses advances in understanding the role of synapses in disease pathogenesis including the accumulation of pathological proteins within synapses, the involvement of glia in synapse degeneration, and trans-synaptic spread of pathology through the brain. The lecture explores the importance of understanding synaptic pathology for developing life-changing treatments.

Presidential Special Lecture - Woolley

Presidential Special Lecture: Neuronal Aging: A Major Risk for Cognitive Decline in Humans — Fred H. Gage

Advances in lifespan outpace healthspan, especially in the brain, where aging drives cognitive decline and ADRD, affecting ~1.3% globally by 2050. Most ADRD cases are sporadic and age-related. Research lacks effective models to study aged human neurons. We developed induced neurons (iNs) from patient fibroblasts, preserving aging features. iNs reveal ADRD drivers: loss of identity, metabolic shifts, inflammation, and genome instability. This model aids in identifying new intervention targets.