The PIs and Co-PIs of grants supported through the NSF-NIH-BMBF Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program meet annually. This will be the seventh meeting of CRCNS investigators, and the first involving US-German projects supported by NSF/NIH and BMBF. The meeting brings together a broad spectrum of computational neuroscience researchers supported by the program, and includes poster presentations, talks and plenary lectures. The meeting is scheduled for October 9-11, 2011 and will be held at Princeton University.
This grant funded the 2011 Principal Investigators Meeting for the NSF/NIH Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program, which was held at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ on October 9 - 11, 2011. Computational and quantitative approaches to the study of the brain and nervous system have been a part of neuroscience since its beginnings as a field. However, recent advances in the ability to collect large data sets, in the ability to create and run very large simulations and in the development of new data analysis approaches such as machine learning may soon lead to an even more central role for computational thinking in this field. The goal of this principal investigators meeting was to foster interaction and collaboration between experimental and computational neuroscientists. All researchers who were (or had been) principal investigators on CRCNS-funded grants were invited to attend and to present updates on their projects; these projects spanned the full range of computational neuroscience research, from mathematical modeling of neural circuits to analysis of large-scale fMRI and electrophysiology datasets. Also, a small number of additional speakers were invited to present new advances and potential new research directions in computational neuroscience. In total, 157 researchers (including principal investigators, trainees, and NSF/NIH program officers) attended the meeting. Over the course of the meeting, there were 27 talks and 55 poster presentations. In addition to these talks and poster presentations, there were pre-meeting workshops on data sharing and US-German collaborations. At the end of the main part of the meeting, participants in the data sharing workshop led a group discussion about how to best promote data sharing between experimental and computational neuroscientists.
