Every summer, the stunning backdrop of Friday Harbor Laboratories hosts 26 students from across the world to take part in an innovative neuroscience workshop.

The Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain brings together graduate students and postdoctoral researchers specializing in either experimental or computational neuroscience—two distinct skills—to learn, collaborate, and discover. 2024 is the Workshop’s ten-year anniversary.

Friday Harbor Laboratories is a working marine research lab of the University of Washington.

It sits 105 miles north of Seattle on San Juan Island.

The first half of the workshop is centered around focused tutorials that teach students how to address scientific questions with the right tools and which computational techniques and datasets are appropriate for the question they want to answer. Instructors combine this with coding tutorials and in-depth, hands-on introductions to Allen Institute datasets.

In the second half, students form groups and apply what they’ve learned to original, collaborative projects—surfacing new insights from the Allen Institute’s rich datasets and learning how to work in diverse teams towards a common goal.

The Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain was founded in 2014 by Christof Koch (far right) and Adrienne Fairhall.

The two-week intensive summer course embodies the Allen Institute’s mission to advance big, team, and open science.

Over the course of its ten-year run, the Workshop has welcomed around 250 students, and has been supported by dozens of lecturers and teaching assistants.

The Workshop brings together the worlds of computational neuroscience and big data at a critical juncture for global neuroscience.

It’s also a place for community building: In the final days of the course the students work together to prepare a team talk in which they present the findings of their group projects and finish with a party to celebrate what they’ve learned and accomplished.