[CogSci] Methods in Neuroscience at Dartmouth Computational Summer School (application deadline 4/15/19)

Tue Apr 2 08:00:46 PDT 2019

Dear Colleagues,

I'd like to pass along information about Dartmouth's annual MIND summer school<http://mindsummerschool.org/>, in case your trainees would be interested in attending.  The application deadline is April 15, 2019.  More information may be found below.

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Vision

Computational methods are rapidly transforming psychology and neuroscience research. However, traditional psychology and neuroscience training programs have not been able to keep pace with rapid development of methodological developments. Our vision is to help train the next generation of psychological and brain scientists in the latest mathematical modeling and analysis tools for studying the mind. Training students in computational techniques in graduate programs, workshops, and tutorials is an extraordinarily challenging endeavor due to high levels of variability in (a) mathematical and computer backgrounds, (b) interest in theory vs applications, and (c) computer operating systems and software packages. Many existing workshops provide hands on training in specific techniques, but this is largely introductory, merely providing superficial exposure to textbook “toy” problems, which is insufficient to allow students to apply these techniques to their own work. We strive to provide a comfortable, inclusive, diverse, nurturing, and exciting learning environment where all participants have the opportunity to further their science. Each year we select a general theme to help frame the lectures and tutorials included in the course. Importantly, these themes always include ties to psychological and neuroscientific questions at a broad range of scales, ranging from single neurons, to full brains, to interacting groups.

This year’s 2019 MIND summer school will be on Cognitive Maps from 8/7/19-8/17-19. Cognitive maps are most commonly associated with the representation and navigation of physical space, but the concept of a map is more generally concerned with how experience is organized to form knowledge. Tantalizingly, it seems that the neural encoding of physical space may also underlie the organization of conceptual and social spaces. The 2019 MIND Computational Summer School will provide participants with tools to study what principles govern the learning, organization, and application of such maps, and to probe their neural underpinnings.

Format

Our summer program takes place over 9 days, with each day organized around four types of sessions.

- Research talks kick off each day by highlighting the use of a specific methods within the context of a particular research question. The goal is to spark ideas by providing inspiring examples of modeling and analysis tools being used in research settings (~2hr/day).
- Tutorials provide introductions to specific methods, enabling students to establish intuitions about how the methods work, formulate expectations about the outputs, and gain hands-on experience applying the methods to real datasets (~2hr/day).
- Pop-up labs are faculty-led research groups that form and evolve organically to collaborate on a variety of research problems throughout the course. This is the core activity and distinguishing feature of our summer school (>4hr/day). Starting on the second day, faculty (and students who volunteer) pitch possible research projects to start organizing attendees into specific pop-up labs. This process continues throughout the summer school as new labs form and reorganize around new findings and evolving interests. This setting provides a highly efficient way for the summer participants to learn from each other and receive active mentorship from course faculty on actual data analysis. At the end of the course participants present their projects to the broader group. Each year a subset of these projects have yielded publication-quality research findings, and they often form the basis of long-term scientific collaborations.
- Breakout sessions provide forums for informal tutorials and discussions for those who are interested (~1hr/day). Our 2018 sessions included discussions on practical issues in doing open science, an introduction to time series analysis, and useful software packages shared by students and faculty.

Faculty (Alphabetical Order)

Luke Chang - Dartmouth College
Christian Doeller - Max Planck for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Yaroslav Halchenko - Dartmouth College
Catherine Hartley - New York University
James Haxby - Dartmouth College
Jeremy Manning - Dartmouth College
Sam McKenzie - New York University
Meghan Meyer - Dartmouth College
Ida Momennejad - Columbia University
Carolyn Parkinson - University of California Los Angeles
Rajesh Ranganath - New York University
David Redish - University of Minnesota
Caroline Robertson - Dartmouth College
Daniela Schiller - Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Kim Stachenfeld - Google DeepMind
Jeffrey Taube - Dartmouth College
Mark Thornton - Princeton University
Matthijs van der Meer - Dartmouth College
Thalia Wheatley - Dartmouth College
Robert Wilson - University of Arizona

Application Information

Who: Grad students, postdocs, junior faculty
Costs: We cover lodging and meals and tuition, you will be responsible for travel
Deadline: April 15th, 2019 at 11:59PM EST
Application: Submit CV, 1 page statement of intent, up to 2 papers as a single file here<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdL6B156A6wgNZRB42JTzIRkzBcrIj0spnv45saotVISHporA/viewform>

Check out our website for more information and tutorials and videos from past years http://mindsummerschool.org<http://mindsummerschool.org/>

Funding

We are thrilled to announce that MIND will be supported for the next 5 years by awards from the National Science Foundation. In addition, MIND is generously supported by the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Neukom Institute for Computational Science, and Research Computing at Dartmouth College.

Organizers

Luke Chang
Jeremy Manning
Matthijs van der Meer

Jeremy R. Manning, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College
HB 6207 Moore Hall
Hanover, NH  03755
USA

Web: http://www.context-lab.com
Phone: 603-646-2777
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