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
9:30-10:00 am
Rainer Friedrich
10:00-10:30 am
Coffee Break
10:30-11:00 am
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
11:00-11:30 am
Kenneth Harris
11:30-12:00 pm
Eva Dyer
12:00-1:30 pm
Lunch
1:30-2:00 pm
Ramon Noguiera
2:00-2:30 pm
Lorenzo Posani
2:30-4:10 pm
Posters/Discussions
4:10-4:40 pm
David Lipshutz
4:40-5:10
Jenelle Feather
October 27 2026 Tuesday
8:30-9:00 am
Breakfast
9:00-9:30 am
Carl Schoonover
9:30-10:00 am
James Fitzgerald
10:00-10:30 am
Coffee Break
10:30-11:00 am
Andrew Saxe
11:00-11:20 am
Dimitra Maoutsa
11:20-11:40 am
Bin Wang
11:40-12:10 pm
Tatyana Sharpee
12:10-1:40 pm
Lunch/Discussion
1:40-2:10 pm
Carina Curto
2:10-2:30 pm
HD Qin
2:30-2:50 pm
Klavdia Zemlianova
2:50-3:20 pm
Hannah Choi
3:20-5:00 pm
Posters/Discussions
5:00-5:30 pm
Daniela Egas Santander
5:30-6:00 pm
Benjamin Dunn
October 28 2026 Wednesday
8:30-9:00 am
Breakfast
9:00-9:30 am
Andrew Fink
9:30-10:00 am
Samuel Muscinelli
10:00-10:30 am
Coffee Break
10:30-11:00 am
Bruno Olshausen
11:00-11:20 am
Wenhao Zhang
11:20-11:40 pm
Rai Sen
11:40-12:10 pm
Alex Williams
12:10-1:40 pm
Lunch
1:40-2:10 pm
Adrien Peyrache
2:10-2:30 pm
Nikki Sanderson
2:30-2:50 pm
Tirtho Biswas
2:50-3:20 pm
Ruben Portugues
3:20-5:00
Final Discussion
Attendees
Organizers
Participants
- Antonio Auffinger – Northwestern University
- Hannah Choi – Georgia Tech
- Ben Dunn – Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- Eva Dyer – University of Pennsylvania
- Daniela Egas Santander – Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG)
- Jenelle Feather – Carnegie Mellon University
- Rainer Friedrich – Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research
- Kenneth Harris – University College London
- Nikolaus Kriegeskorte – Columbia University
- Bruno Olshausen – University of California, Berkeley
- Adrien Peyrache – McGill University
- Ruben Portugues – Cornell University
- Lorenzo Posani – Paris Brain Institute (ICM)
- Andrew Saxe – University College London
- Carl Schoonover – Allen Institute
- Tatyana Sharpee – Salk Institute
- Alex Williams – New York University
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