San Juan Winter School on Connectomics and Brain Simulation

Over the past 20 years, the field of connectomics has focused on the goal of reconstructing neuronal wiring diagrams. Highly visible signs of success at this technological quest include the neuronal wiring diagrams (connectomes) that were recently completed for Drosophila. Today a new challenge has become prominent and important: now that we have connectomes, how can we use them to make discoveries about brain function? Exciting progress is being made on this front, and is opening the door to a new age of discovery.

In the first week of this two-week course, lecturers will teach the computational and scientific concepts necessary for making discoveries about brain function from connectomic data. There will also be hands-on practical sessions in which students learn how to access data, apply software tools, and disseminate their derived data products and code. In the second week of the course, students will conduct connectomic research on problems of their choice. We expect that some projects will be based on computational analysis and interpretation of connectomes. Other projects will be full-blown brain simulations.

The course will focus on Drosophila melanogaster, for which large and well-annotated connectomes are publicly available. Lectures will address vision, olfaction, navigation, motor control, sex-specific behaviors, and learning. Technical topics will include neural nets, differentiable brain simulations, biophysical models of neurons and synapses, and graph algorithms.