September 19th - 23rd 2011

-- organized by  David Hofmann

The course is intended to provide graduate students and young researchers from all parts of neuroscience with working knowledge of theoretical and computational methods in neuroscience and to acquaint them with recent developments in this field.

The speakers will provide an overview on important aspects and recent developments in their fields of expertise by means of three-hour tutorials. In addition to the tutorials, participants will gather in small groups and study one out of a number of recent research papers that are related to the respective tutorial. The "self-study" will be supervised by the speakers who will encourage students to apply and extend what they have learned in the tutorials towards achieving deeper insight into the main ideas of the paper. The results of the self-study will be shared and discussed with other participants and the speakers during the presentations.

This combination of lecturing and interactive learning has proven effective over the previous years (1999 and 2001 at Bochum, 2003 - 2010 at Göttingen) at balancing depth with the time constraints of the course.

• Rainer Friedrich, Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel, Switzerland
• Michael J. Gutnick, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
  
• Robert Gütig, Max-Planck-Institut for Experimental Medicine, Göttingen, Germany
• Jason Kerr, Neural Population Imaging, Max-Planck-Institut für biologische Kybernetik, Tübingen, Germany
• David McAlpine, Ear Institute, School of Life & Medical Sciences, University College London, United Kingdom
  
• Sara Solla, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA
  

Course details

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. Each day will be dedicated to a different topic. Part of the teaching will be a structured tutorial, and the rest will be carried out in group activities lead by the participants. In previous years each day was 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 the self-study phase to answer questions related to the papers.

3. Later in the afternoon there will be units of 15-minute-presentations of these papers by one or more representatives of each group and discussions with the tutorial speakers.

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

Schedule

Questions
Can be asked via our contact form.

Former Fall Courses on Computational Neuroscience in Göttingen

2010  2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003