Lecturers

Upinder Bhalla – National Centre for Biological Sciences, India
Federico Carnevale – DeepMind Technologies, London, UK
Matthew Cook – UZH, Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zurich, Switzerland
Florian Engert – Harvard University, USA
Balázs Hangya – IEM, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
Tomáš Hromádka – Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
Benjamin Judkewitz – Einstein Center for Neuroscience, Germany
Georg Keller – Friedrich Miescher Institute, Switzerland
Christian Machens – Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal
Markus Meister – California Institute of Technology, USA
Marta Moita – Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal
Tom Mrsic-Flögel – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, University College London, UK
Venkatesh Murthy – Harvard University, USA
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
Nao Uchida – Harvard University, USA
Daniela Vallentin – Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology, Germany
Mitsuko Watabe-Uchida – Harvard University, USA
Chris Xu – Cornell University, 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

Harald Bârzan – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Antonin Blot – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Rob Campbell – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Andrei Ciuparu – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Aleena Garner – Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland
Medorian Gheorghiu – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Priyanka Gupta – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA
Mitra Javadzadeh – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Mateusz Kostecki – Nencki Institute for Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland
Gonçalo Lopes – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Fred Marbach – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, UK
Vasile V. Moca – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Mehrab Modi – Janelia Research Campus, USA
Adriana Nagy-Dăbâcan – Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Jon Newman – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Bruno Pichler – INSS (Independent NeuroScience Services), UK
Nacho Sanguinetti – Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany
Hande Tunbak – Wolfson Institute of Biomedical Research - Division of Medicine, UCL, UK
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.