IBRO and CNS*2011, or happy neuroscience days

July 31, 2011

I just got back from attending the IBRO World Congress in Florence and the CNS*2011 meeting in Stockholm.  All I can say is: lucky me.

Okay, clearly that’s not all I can say.  They were both wonderful meetings and it was great to see so much good neuroscience going on.  IBRO had quite the turnout with 4,200 people attending this year.  I got to hear some really nice talks from across the spectrum – neural injury to neuroscience in the media to everything hippocampal (memory, sleep, neurogenesis…) – with my usual lament. How does one person handle five simultaneous sessions?

Perhaps of most interest to GigaScience readers were the Transcriptomic and Gene Expression Approaches to Neurological Disorder session with Yuri Bozzi, David Henshall, Stefano Gustincich, and John Hohmann, and the Advances In Optical Imaging of Brain Function session with talks by Thomas Nevian, Stephan J. Sigrist, Gunter Giese, and Daniele Arosi.

CNS*2011 was a much more intimate meeting and the mood was excellent. I really like talking with people who are excited about their work and CNS*2011 was an ideal place for that.

It’s very hard to pick out the meeting highpoints, but I greatly enjoyed Ivan Soltesz’s opening keynote on his experimental and modeling work on the epileptic hippocampus – and hearing that his large-scale models are freely available on ModelDB.

I think readers would also have enjoyed two super-computational neuroscience workshops, the first run by Dan Gardner and the second by Abigail Morrison, Markus Diesmann and Anders Lansner.

So, yeah, lucky me!