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A two-week summer camp for neuroscience students building bridges, surfacing insights, and teaching cutting-edge computational methods
09.24.2024
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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.
Students Katherine Perks (University of Washington), Nicholas Tolley (Brown University), and Rachel Mikofsky (Cornell University)
From left to right: Eric Shea-Brown, Shawn Olsen, Michael Buice, Saskia de Vries, Christof Koch
The Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain was founded in 2014 by Christof Koch (far right) and Adrienne Fairhall.
Eric Shea-Brown, co-director of the Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain and professor at the University of Washington
The two-week intensive summer course embodies the Allen Institute’s mission to advance big, team, and open science.
Shawn Olsen, investigator at the Allen Institute
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.
Saskia de Vries, associate director of data and outreach at the Allen Institute
The Workshop brings together the worlds of computational neuroscience and big data at a critical juncture for global neuroscience.
Michael Buice, associate investigator at the Allen Institute
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.
The Allen Institute is an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization founded by philanthropist and visionary, the late Paul G. Allen. The Allen Institute is dedicated to answering some of the biggest questions in bioscience and accelerating research worldwide. The Institute is a recognized leader in large-scale research with a commitment to an open science model. Its research institutes and programs include the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Allen Institute for Cell Science, the Allen Institute for Immunology, and the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics. In 2016, the Allen Institute expanded its reach with the launch of The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, which identifies pioneers with new ideas to expand the boundaries of knowledge and make the world better. For more information, visit alleninstitute.org.
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