Overview
Part of NITMB Scientific Focus: Theory and Mathematics in Neuroscience
Recent advances in neuroscience reveal that neural activity often exhibits striking geometric structure across sensory, cognitive, and motor systems. For instance, low-dimensional neural activity manifolds encode behavioral and cognitive variables in many brain regions, and these manifolds can vary less across time, individuals, and species than single neuron activity. These findings suggest that geometry is fundamental to neural computation and may provide a unifying perspective on how neural systems represent information, perform computations, and support behavior.
This workshop will bring together experimentalists, theorists, and mathematicians to identify geometric principles underlying neural computation, highlight open mathematical challenges, and foster collaborations at the interface of neuroscience and geometry. Neuroscience topics will include representational geometry in neural population activity, the structure and function of neural manifolds, the geometry of parameter landscapes underlying neural computation and learning, and geometric and topological approaches to high-dimensional neural data. The workshop aims to both highlight existing mathematical ideas in neuroscience and identify new mathematical questions inspired by neural systems. Relevant areas of mathematics include differential geometry, topology, dynamical systems, optimization, and information geometry. The program will include invited talks, focused discussions, and opportunities for informal exchange aimed at developing a common language for describing neural systems in geometric terms.
Schedule
October 26 2026 Monday
8:30-9:00 am
Breakfast
9:00-9:30 am
SueYeon Chung
Neural Population Geometry for Understanding Behavior in a Complex World.
9:30-10:00 am
Rainer Friedrich
Connectivity underlying representational manifolds in zebrafish olfaction and navigation
10:00-10:30 am
Coffee Break
10:30-11:00 am
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
Measuring the geometry and topology of neural representations
11:00-11:30 am
Dabin Kwon
AI-discovered tuning laws explain neuronal population code geometry
11:30-12:00 pm
Eva Dyer
In search of common coordinates across brains
12:00-1:30 pm
Lunch
1:30-2:00 pm
Ramon Nogueira
The geometry of context-dependent biased decisions during learning
2:00-2:30 pm
Lorenzo Posani
Linking neural selectivity, dimensionality, and computation along the cortical hierarchy
2:30-4:10 pm
Posters/Discussions
4:10-4:40 pm
David Lipshutz
Comparing the local geometry of sensory representations
4:40-5:10
Jenelle Feather
Building and breaking models of sensory systems
October 27 2026 Tuesday
8:30-9:00 am
Breakfast
9:00-9:30 am
Carl Schoonover
Representational drift in olfactory cortex
9:30-10:00 am
James Fitzgerald
Geometric perspectives on representational drift
10:00-10:30 am
Coffee Break
10:30-11:00 am
Andrew Saxe
Theory of Feature Formation, Expression and Reorganization in Quadratic Networks
11:00-11:20 am
Dimitra Maoutsa
Reward reorganizes population activity along task-relevant dimensions
11:20-11:40 am
Bin Wang
High-dimensional hippocampus representation facilitates learning of low-dimensional abstract representation and supports generalization.
11:40-12:10 pm
Tatyana Sharpee
Hyperbolic Hypothesis for the Structure and Function of Neural Circuits
12:10-1:40 pm
Lunch/Discussion
1:40-2:10 pm
Carina Curto
Network dominoes: composable building blocks for recurrent networks
2:10-2:30 pm
HD Qin
“The Information Geometry of Neural State Transitions: Fluctuations, Geodesics”
2:30-2:50 pm
Klavdia Zemlianova
Geometry of neural activity during spontaneous sequential behavior
2:50-3:20 pm
Hannah Choi
Latent geometry in multimodal active sensing
3:20-5:00 pm
Posters/Discussions
5:00-5:30 pm
Daniela Egas Santander
Higher-Order topology of biological neural networks, from neuronal morphology to simple rules
5:30-6:00 pm
Benjamin Dunn
TBA
October 28 2026 Wednesday
8:30-9:00 am
Breakfast
9:00-9:30 am
Andrew Fink
A network mechanism for perceptual learning
9:30-10:00 am
Samuel Muscinelli
Correlated degrees, decorrelated responses: how connectivity structure shapes response geometry
10:00-10:30 am
Coffee Break
10:30-11:00 am
Bruno Olshausen
Geometric representations for vision and navigation
11:00-11:20 am
Wenhao Zhang
(Group) Symmetry: A Design Principle of Neural Information Processing in the Brain?
11:20-11:40 pm
Rai Sen
A Linearly Generalizable Spatial Map in the Medial Frontal Cortex
11:40-12:10 pm
Alex Williams
Geometric Encoding of Bayesian Computations in Recurrent Networks
12:10-1:40 pm
Lunch
1:40-2:10 pm
Adrien Peyrache
Rigid inputs, learned maps: prediction builds the hippocampal cognitive map
2:10-2:30 pm
Nikki Sanderson
"Circles in the Circuit: A topological analysis of the Drosophila connectome"
2:30-2:50 pm
Tirtho Biswas
A general construction of continuous attractor networks from the topology of neuronal activity
2:50-3:10 pm
Isaac Wei
"Invariance of odor identity encoding in piriform cortex despite variable sniffing behavior"
3:10-3:40 pm
Ruben Portugues
The symmetries of the sensory world constrain heading direction representations
3:40-5:00
Final Discussion
Attendees
Organizers
Speakers
- Tirtho Biswas, Northwestern University
- Hannah Choi, Georgia Institute of Technology
- SueYeon Chung, Harvard University
- Benjamin Dunn, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- Eva Dyer, University of Pennsylvania
- Jenelle Feather, Carnegie Mellon University
- Rainer Friedrich, Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research
- Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Columbia University
- Dabin Kwon, University College London
- Dimitra Maoutsa, Independent
- Bruno Olshausen, UC Berkeley
- Adrien Peyrache, McGill
- Ruben Portugues, Cornell University
- Lorenzo Posani, CNRS, Paris Brain Institute
- Haodang Qin, University of California, San Diego
- Nikki Sanderson, Institute for Advanced Study
- Daniela Egas Santander, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
- Andrew Saxe, University College London
- Carl Schoonover, Allen Institute for Brain Dynamics
- Rai Sen, Columbia University
- Tatyana Sharpee, Salk Institute
- Bin Wang, Columbia University
- Alex Williams, New York University
- Klavdia Zemlianova, Columbia University
- Wenhao Zhang, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Participants
- Lyn Ackert-Smith, Northwestern University
- Ayo Adewakun, Northwestern University
- Tuca Auffinger, Northwestern University
- Kai Cao, Northwestern University
- Selimzhan Chalyshkan, Northwestern University
- Uma Dayal, Brown University
- Giulia Garcia Lorenzana, NITMB
- Tuguldur Gerelmaa, Northwestern University
- Joshua Glaser, Northwestern
- Santiago Guardo Maya, Northwestern University
- Minh Ha Quang, RIKEN/University of Chicago
- Nicole Howard, Northwestern University
- Ashley Hsieh, Northwestern University
- John Issa, Case Western Reserve University
- Jency Jiang, Brown University
- Alex Kainath, University of Illinois Chicago
- Aravind Kotikelapudi, The University of Chicago
- Ryan Lu, Northwestern University
- Malcolm MacIver, Northwestern University
- Loïc Magrou, The University of Chicago
- Sebastian Malagon Perez, Northwestern University
- Tushya Mehta, Northwestern University
- Lina Morhai, Northwestern University
- Shoutik Mukherjee, Northwestern University
- Noah Palmer, University of Colorado Boulder
- Abhimanyu Pavuluri, University of Chicago
- Hardik Rajpal, Imperial College London
- Poojya Ravishankar, University of Chicago
- Safaan Sadiq, Independent
- Rai Sen, Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute
- Yuta Senzai, Northwestern University
- Akyl Shakir, Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- Vinay Shirhatti, University of Chicago
- Pulkit Singh, The University of Chicago
- Gbenga Solomon, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)
- Elif Tan, Ankara University
- Travis Thompson, Texas Tech University
- Vivian Tu, Northwestern University
- Andrew Ulmer, Northwestern University
- Peiyu Wang, Northwestern University
- Yichen Wang, University of Chicago
- Hannah Wirtshafter, Northwestern University
- Dennis Wu, Northwestern University
- Draco Xu, University of Chicago
- Priscilla Yinzime, Illinois Institute of Technology
- Zeyu Yun, University of California, Berkeley
- Huanqiu Zhang, University of Chicago
- Ling-Qi Zhang, HHMI Janelia Research Campus
Scholars-in-Residence
- Loris Amalberti – Israel Institute of Technology – Technion
- Ethan Baxter – Northwestern University
- Carlos “Joaquin” Castañeda Castro – Brown University
- Zimei Chen – University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
- Kabir Dabholkar – Princeton University
- Julia Fadjukov – Northwestern University
- Pierre-Etienne Fiquet – Flatiron Institute
- Aditi Jha – Stanford University
- Saar Nehemia – Israel Institute of Technology – Technion
- Sonja Petrovic – Illinois Institute Technology
- Ngoc Anh Phan – Brandeis University
- Shuqi Wang – EPFL
- Peter Xu – University of Chicago
- Xiaoyu Yang – University of Chicago
- Jie Zang – Brown University