The inaugural Scientific Day of the Graduate School Brain Dynamics took place on October 7th. More than 90 doctoral students, postdocs and principal investigators from all areas of neuroscience met in the beautiful Felix-Klein auditorium and exchanged ideas and research results. For many participants this was the first opportunity to personally meet so many colleagues from the faculties of Life Sciences, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine, Mathematics and Informatics, and Sports Science, as well as from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, and the MPIs for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Mathematics in the Sciences, and Evolutionary Anthropology.
The program started with a keynote lecture by Gilles Laurent, director of the MPI for Brain Research in Frankfurt, who talked about neural dynamics in sleep and visual texture perception. It was a unique opportunity to see how an inventive approach to studying brain dynamics in unconventional animal model systems can yield ground-breaking results. The day continued with a series of poster- and oral presentation sessions by doctoral students and postdocs, who shared and discussed their latest results and ideas. A lightning talk round put the speed and efficiency of the PIs to the test. In only five minutes per talk eleven PIs presented their labs and main research focuses, ranging from the cellular basis of learning in fruit flies, to cortical synapses in mice and psychotherapy research. The end of the scientific program brought another keynote speaker, Marlene Bartos, director of the Institute of Physiology at the University Freiburg, who presented cutting-edge methods and exciting results on the encoding and recall of episodic memories in the hippocampus. The scientific day ended with a fascinating tour through the Federal Administrative Court, one of the most striking representative buildings in Germany.
The next scientific day will be held in late September 2023.
