The course is intended to provide graduate students and young researchers from all parts of neuroscience with a knowledge of the major theoretical and computational methods in neuroscience and to acquaint them with recent developments in this field. One of the main objectives of the course is to enable participants from any field of neuroscience to study recent research papers on their own.

Along with traditional lectures that provide an overview of important aspects and recent developments, students gather in small groups and study one out of a number of recent research papers that are related to the respective topic. The "self-study" is supervised by the speaker who will encourage students to apply and extend what they have learned in the lectures towards achieving deeper insight into the main ideas of the paper.

This combination of lecturing and interactive learning has proven effective over the previous years (1999 and 2001 at Bochum, 2003 - 2012 at Göttingen) at balancing depth with the time constraints of the course.

• Nancy Kopell, Boston University, USA
  
• Naftali Tishby, Hebrew University, Israel
  
• Moritz Helias, Juelich Research Centre, Germany
• ...
  

Course details

Each day will be dedicated to a different topic. Part of the teaching will be a structured lecture, and the rest will be carried out in group activities lead by the participants and facilitated by the speaker. Each day is divided into three phases:

1. In the morning until noon there will be a tutorial consisting of two lectures (2 times 90 min) where (as a rule) the first one should introduce the topic of research and the second one should provide more specific background information for the study of a number of recent key papers in the field.

2. Each paper is then assigned to a group consisting of about four participants. The papers can be downloaded some days before the course begins and students should scan the papers before the day of the respective lecture. In the early afternoon, the participants will discuss the paper and prepare a presentation to the members of the other groups. The speakers will be available during this self-study phase to answer questions related to the papers.

3. Later in the afternoon, the results of the self-study will be shared and discussed with other participants and the speakers during the presentations. , They should last about 15 minutes each, summarize the salient points of the work, and comment on its strengths and weaknesses.

In the evening there will be opportunities to participate in various social activities.

Schedule

-- organized by  Maximilian Puelma-Touzel
Agostina Palmigiano
David Hofmann

-- adminstration by  Regina Wunderlich
Viktoria Novak