The Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain is an intensive, project-based residential course with a focus on the neurobiology of sensory processing, coding, and neural population dynamics. This program is intended for researchers at the PhD student and postdoctoral level with an interest in developing the intersection of their scientific knowledge and their computational skills.

Founded by Adrienne Fairhall and Christof Koch, the Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain is co-hosted by the Allen Institute and the Computational Neuroscience Center at the University of Washington. It is directed by Drs. Michael A. Buice, Saskia de Vries, Adrienne Fairhall, Shawn Olsen, and Eric Shea-Brown.

The workshop is geared towards PhD students and postdoctoral fellows in neuroscience, biology, physics, engineering, and computer science as well as other early-career researchers at the equivalent level. Ideal candidates have a planned or established research agenda related to the course topics.

Throughout the course, students attend lectures by leading neuroscientists. Lecture topics include neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, neuronal cell types, connectomics, optical and electrophysiological methods for measuring and analyzing cell populations, theories and modeling of neocortex and associated structures, big data approaches, and perceptual and behavioral neuroscience, with a focus on the visual system.

All tutorials and software packages in the course use the Python programming language. The workshop includes an optional Python bootcamp and ongoing software tutorials in modeling, data analysis, and computational methods. While previous experience with Python is not required or expected, it is highly recommended that students have some previous coding experience.

Students will have the opportunity to receive training with featured large-scale datasets generated by the Allen Institute. Examples from past workshops include the Allen Brain Observatory Visual Coding and Neuropixels datasets. Other Allen Institute resources are available also for students to explore.

A core component of the workshop curriculum is the completion of short research projects. With faculty guidance, students collaborate in teams to develop and carry out a project that explores the featured open data sets. Student teams present their project proposals at the end of the first week of the course and the outcome of their work at the conclusion of the workshop to faculty and fellow participants. Previous projects from this course have been developed into publications and presented at scientific conferences.