Lecturers

Upinder Bhalla – National Centre for Biological Sciences, India
Juan Burrone – King's College London, UK
Santiago Canals – CSIC-UMH, Spain
Sophie Deneve – Ecole Normale Superieure, France
Michael Dickinson – Caltech, Pasadena, USA
Florian Engert – Harvard University, USA
Michale Fee – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Balázs Hangya – IEM, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
Sonja Hofer – Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland
Tomáš Hromádka – Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
Benjamin Judkewitz – Einstein Center for Neuroscience, Germany
Georg Keller – Friedrich Miescher Institute, Switzerland
Suhasa Kodandaramaiah – University of Minnesota, USA
Christian Machens - Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal
Hannah Monyer – DKFZ, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Tom Mrsic-Flögel – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, University College London, UK
Ruben Portugues – Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Germany
Tobias Rose – Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Germany
Botond Roska – Friedrich Miescher Institute, Switzerland
Wolf Singer – Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Germany
Marcus Stephenson Jones – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Nao Uchida – Harvard University, USA
Chris Xu – Cornell University, USA
Tony Zador – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA

Organizers

Florin Albeanu – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA
Adam Kampff – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, University College London, UK
Raul Mureşan – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Teaching Assistants

Antonin Blot – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Rob Campbell – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Federico Carnevale – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA
Adriana Nagy-Dăbâcan – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Medorian Gheorghiu – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Priyanka Gupta – National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India & CSHL, NY, USA
Mitra Javadzadeh – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Gonçalo Lopes – Champalimaud Foundation, Centre for the Unknown, Lisbon, Portugal
Fred Marbach – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA
Vasile Moca – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Mehrab N. Modi – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA
Jon Newman – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Bruno Pichler – INSS (Independent NeuroScience Services)
Nacho Sanguinetti – Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany
Iuliu Vasilescu – Politechnica University, Bucharest, Romania
Jakob Voigts – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Petr Znamenskiy – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK

Topics

Basic Optics – Diffraction and Resolution. Illumination Techniques. Numerical Aperture.
Optical bench exercises – Lenses, optical systems, illumination methods, basic microscopy techniques. How to custom build different kinds of microscopes.
Noise measurements and photo-sensors – Shot noise, optical detectors, amplifiers, NI-DAQ, CCD cameras, photodiodes, photo multiplier tubes (PMTs).
Light and fluorescence microscopy – Fluorescence, FRAP, photo-activation, photo-conversion. Point spread function measurements, basic image analysis (deconvolution, denoising, PCA).
Fluorescence probes – GFP, GFP based chromophores, organic calcium dyes, genetically encoded calcium dyes, pHluorins, voltage sensitive dyes.
Intrinsic Optical Imaging – Visual, auditory & barrel cortex; olfactory bulb. Students will build a custom wide field fluorescence and intrinsic optical imaging rig.
Scanning microscopy – Confocal and two-photon microscopy. Lasers. Students will build a two-photon microscope and write custom scanning and acquisition software in MATLAB and NI DAQmx. The ScanImage API.
Viral approaches to label, monitor and alter neuronal circuits.
Optogenetics – Light activated ion channels and pumps. Patterned photo-stimulation techniques.
Benchtop electronics and basic electrophysiology – Impedence and Dipoles. Amplifiers. Extracellular and intracellular recordings. LFP; single unit, multi-unit extracellular recordings, tetrodes, electrode arrays; patch clamp.
Awake head fixed and freely moving optical and electrophysiological recording strategies in rodents – Microdrives. Fiber optic based systems. Open source systems. Open Ephys.
Techniques for electrophysiological data analysis.
Monitoring animal behavior – Open Source tools for acquisition and analysis of video data. Intro to Bonsai and Arduino. Training Strategies. Closed loop systems.
Neuronal functional connectivity and neuronal connectomics – Serial electron-microscopy and trans-synaptic labeling methods.
Synchrony and oscillations.
Cortical attention, sparse neuronal codes.
Decision making, uncertainty, neuro-modulatory systems.