US-French Collaboration in Computational Neuroscience, Paris, November 29-30, 2011
This award supports a US-French workshop, led by Aude Oliva and Alain Destexhe, on binational collaboration in computational neuroscience. The workshop builds on interests by NSF, Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), and other agencies in collaborative research in this rapidly developing area of research. The workshop will explore the intellectual opportunities, educational and economically relevant impacts, and practical considerations needed for US-French collaboration to be successful. The workshop will be attended by US and French researchers, and representatives from US and French funding organizations. A report from the workshop will be made available at www.nsf.gov/crcns.
Computational Neuroscience brings together the efforts of several scientific fields to provide a computational description of brain and behavior, across multiple spatio-temporal scales, species and development and at different levels of analysis (cellular, systems, cognitive and algorithmic). By encompassing domains such as biology, neuroscience, psychology, social sciences, computer science, physics, and mathematics, computational neuroscience benefits from a reciprocal exchange among new methods. Further, Computational Neuroscience has the potential to provide significant, influential breakthroughs in medicine, life sciences, and computer science among others, and, as such, constitutes an interdisciplinary grand challenge for contemporary science and engineering. Within this context, the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) of France and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) convened a two-day workshop to address the key challenges as the field moves forward into the next decade, and to explore the possibility of creating international teams of researchers between the United States and France. Twenty expert scientists and engineers from both countries met to discuss and identify research areas for sustainable and complementary US-French collaborations in the area of Computational Neuroscience. The objectives of the panel discussions were: 1) to articulate the space of potential intellectual partnerships and the value added by bringing US and French researchers together; 2) to analyze the broader impacts of a partnership between US and France; 3) to identify the relevant practical considerations and specific needs for making US-French collaborative efforts scientifically and operationally successful. The US-French collaborative research projects in computational neuroscience was announced in Fall 2012. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12114/nsf12114.jsp
