Saturday, June 14, 2025
6/14/2025
Visual Neuroscience Advanced Research Training Course - Abstract We request support from the NIH Brain Initiative for a two-week Advanced Research Training course in Visual Neuroscience (VN) at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA. Vision is our most precious and important sense, with more than 50% of the cerebral cortex involved in processing information from our eyes. Vision is the most widely studied sensory modality, investigated by research laboratories around the world who seek to understand normal visual function and vision disorders. Driving these efforts are new technologies for visualizing and identifying different types of neurons, mapping neural connectivity, and measuring and manipulating neural activity at different scales to determine the neural basis of visual perception. While most graduate students and postdocs encounter some advanced technologies, most institutions do not have an organized lab course that covers the broad range of modern methods in visual neuroscience. Our goal is to establish a new intensive summer course that will jump-start lab proficiency and solidify the learning of fundamental concepts in visual neuroscience. Our specific aims are to: 1) Train students in the fundamental concepts of visual neuroscience, through lectures given by faculty who are thought leaders in their fields. Topics will range from phototransduction, to information processing, to transformation of neural activity to visual control of behavior. 2) Train students in modern methods for understanding the visual system, including large-scale electron microscopic analysis of the visual system connectome, large-scale multielectrode recording of spike activity, large-scale functional imaging of assemblies of neurons in the visual system with activity-dependent fluorescent indicators, and large-scale transcriptomic analysis to determine the molecular identity of individual cells. The course will take a comparative approach, utilizing various model systems including an invertebrate (octopus), a cold-blooded vertebrate (zebrafish), and a mammal (mouse). 3) To build community between students and faculty who study the visual system across multiple levels of organization. The MBL is a fertile environment for scientific innovation and communication and the high faculty to student ratio is ideal for building professional relationships that will promote students’ success throughout their careers. 4) To enhance the diversity of both teaching faculty and VN students. Faculty from diverse backgrounds will enrich the learning experience, in part by serving as excellent role models for attracting more diverse student applicants. The course resonates with at least 4 priority areas targeted by the NIH BRAIN Initiative: 1) identification and characterization of distinct neuronal cell types, 2) investigation of circuit connections that map the visual world, 3) recording the dynamics of neuronal signaling in the visual system to better understand representations of changing visual stimuli, 4) linking spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity with visually-evoked behavior to elucidate mechanisms of visual perception.
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