Chicago, IL 60611 United States
Overview
The NITMB Scientific Focus on Theory and Mathematics in Neuroscience is a six-week long program comprising a junior scientist workshop, a trio of focused conferences, and a collection of collaborative projects at the National Institute on Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB). Together, these coordinated events are intended to bring emerging and established investigators into sustained conversation around three branches of mathematics that increasingly shape modern neuroscience: dynamics, geometry, and probability.
Dynamics in Neuroscience Conference. This workshop explores new mathematics related to dynamical systems and neuroscience. Major themes include network dynamics, learning dynamics, and data-driven methods. Organizers: Doiron, Kaufman, Litwin-Kumar, Noorman, Riecke, Zavatone-Veth.
Geometry in Neuroscience Conference. The overarching goal of this three-day workshop (October 26-28) is to identify and discuss new mathematics related to geometry and neuroscience. Major themes include representational geometry, neural network loss surfaces, and topological data analysis. Organizers: Curto, Fink, Fitzgerald, Lipshutz, Muscinelli, Nogueira.
Probabilistic Inference in Neuroscience. The overarching goal of this three-day workshop (November 2-4) is to identify and discuss new mathematics related to stochastic processes and neuroscience. Major themes include neural coding, neural data science, and NeuroAI. Organizers: Chklovskii, Fairhall, Glaser, Miri, Palmer, Vaikuntanathan. A͟p͟p͟l͟y͟ N͟o͟w͟
Core Program. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have been selected for a six-week residency at NITMB. These junior scientists will work directly with six invited senior investigators whose expertise spans the thematic conferences (Chklovskii, Curto, Fairhall, Lipshutz, Litwin-Kumar, Zavatone-Veth) and the core organizing team (Doiron, Fink, Fitzgerald, Palmer). Shared meals, evening discussions, and occasional weekend excursions will help build a cohesive and enduring scholarly community. The program culminates in collaborative research projects. Trainees will develop these projects throughout their residency and during two dedicated research weeks designed to facilitate focused progress. Participants will be encouraged to propose project extensions that could be hosted throughout an additional collaborative residence at NITMB with collaborators and/or their home institution mentors.
During the opening week, the junior scientists will be in close residence with the organizers and all six visiting PIs in an intensive Junior Scientist Workshop setting. Trainees will present their work in a 20-minute research talk and deliver a 60-minute blackboard tutorial that introduces core concepts, methodological frameworks, and/or major open questions at a depth rarely possible in standard meetings. This opening week will be coordinated by NITMB faculty, ensuring continuous mentorship, structure, and institutional support.
Three subsequent weeks will center on one of the thematic conferences, feature two of the visiting PIs, and have a dedicated team of NITMB co-organizers responsible for shaping the scientific program and supporting the trainees (see above). These conferences will be open to the broader community and will convene a wide range of theoretical and experimental researchers for three days of talks and discussion, with the junior scientists participating fully. Following each conference, the two paired external PIs will remain for two dedicated “digest” days designed exclusively for the trainees. These smaller sessions will emphasize synthesis of conference material, development of concrete research directions, and application of dynamics, geometry, and probability to contemporary problems in neurobiology.
The core long program will culminate in research projects. The trainees will be able to work on these projects throughout the program and during two dedicated research weeks that will facilitate focused progress and come in the middle and end of the program. Interested students will be encouraged to propose project extensions that could be hosted throughout an additional collaborative residence at the NITMB with their long-program collaborators and/or home-institution mentors.
Schedule
October 5th Week
Initial Junior Scientist Workshop
October 12
Conference 1: Dynamics
October 19 Week
Intermediate collaborative project week (non-neuroscience workshop scheduled at NITMB –Representing and Learning Morphology and Shape Dynamics from Biological Data)
October 26 Week
Conference 2: Geometry
November 2 Week
Conference 3: Probability
November 9 Week
Final Project Week
Participants
Core Organizers
- Brent Doiron – University of Chicago
- Andrew Fink – Northwestern University
- James Fitzgerald – Northwestern University
- Stephanie Palmer – University of Chicago
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
All Participants
- Athena Akrami – University College London
- Tuca Auffinger – Northwestern University
- Dmitri Chklovskii – Flatiron Institute
- Hannah Choi – Georgia Institute of Technology
- SueYeon Chung – Harvard University
- David Clark – Harvard University
- Christine Constantinople – New York University
- Carina Curto – Brown University
- Benjamin Dunn – Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- Daniela Egas Santander – Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
- Bard Ermentrout – University of Pittsburgh
- Adrienne Fairhall – University of Washington
- Loren Frank – University of California San Francisco
- Rainer Friedrich – Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research
- Josh Glaser – Northwestern University
- Kenneth Harris – University College London
- Bill Kath – Northwestern University
- Matt Kaufman – University of Chicago
- Nikolaus Kriegeskorte – Columbia University
- David Lipshutz – Baylor College of Medicine
- Ashok Litwin-Kumar – Columbia University
- Chris Lynn – Yale University
- Malcolm MacIver – Northwestern University
- Andrew Miri – Northwestern University
- Katie Morrison – University of Northern Colorado
- Sam Muscinelli – University of Chicago
- Ramon Nogueira Manas – University of Chicago
- Marcella Noorman – University of Chicago
- Ulises Pereira Obilinovic – Allen Institute
- Bruno Olshausen – University of California Berkeley
- Cengiz Pehlevan – Harvard University
- Adrien Peyrache – McGill University
- Ruben Portugues – Cornell University
- Luisa Ramirez – Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz
- Hermann Riecke – Northwestern University
- Jonathan Rubin – University of Pittsburgh
- Andrew Saxe – University College London
- Carl Schoonover – Allen Institute for Brain Dynamics
- Tatyana Sharpee, Salk Institute
- Eric Shea-Brown – University of Washington
- Suri Vaikuntanathan – University of Chicago
- Siwei Wang – Stony Brook University
- Alex Williams – New York University
- Byron Yu – Carnegie Mellon University
- Jacob Zavatone-Veth – Harvard University
Participants - Dynamics Conference
October 12 – 14, 2026 | C͟l͟i͟c͟k͟ H͟e͟r͟e͟ f͟o͟r͟ W͟o͟r͟k͟s͟h͟o͟p͟ W͟e͟b͟p͟a͟g͟e͟
Organizers
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Hermann Riecke – Northwestern University
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Matthew Kaufman – University of Chicago
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Marcella Noorman – University of Chicago
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Brent Doiron – University of Chicago
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Jacob Zavatone-Veth – Harvard University
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Ashok Litwin-Kumar – Columbia University
Participants
- Dinu Albeanu – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Zahra Aminzare – University of Iowa
- Rachel Bernasconi – University of Surrey
- Tirhabir Biswas – Northwestern University
- Dmitri Chklovskii – Flatiron Institute
- Hannah Choi – Georgia Institute of Technology
- David Clark – Kempner Institute, Harvard University
- Julia Cox – The University of Chicago
- Yangyang Du – University of Michigan
- Leah Dunker – Columbia University
- Florian Engert – Harvard University
- Bard Ermentrout – University of Pittsburgh
- Andrew Fink – Northwestern University
- James Fitzgerald – Northwestern University
- Kevin Franks – Duke University
- Gregory Handy – University of Minnesota
- Juliet Jiang – The University of Chicago
- James Maclaurin – New Jersey Institute of Technology
- Dimitra Maoutsa – Independent
- Lee Miller – Northwestern University
- Katie Morrison – University of Northern Colorado
- Kathy Nagel – New York University
- Anne Marie Oswald – The University of Chicago
- Cengiz Pehlevan – Harvard University
- Ulises Pereira Obilinovic – Allen Institute
- Tuan Pham – University of Amsterdam
- Suraj Powar – Southern Illinois University
- William Qian – Harvard University
- Robert Rosenbaum – University of Notre Dame
- Benjamin Ruben – Harvard University
- Jonathan Rubin – University of Pittsburgh
- Bennet Sakelaris – Sorbonne University
- Eric Shea-Brown – University of Washington
- Farshad Shirani – Emory University
- Ekin Ture – Southern Illinois University
- Qingyang Wang – Janelia Research Campus HHMI
- Chongwen Wang – Harvard University
- Zhuan Wang – University of California, Los Angeles
- Shiyue Xu – Northwestern University
- Yunlong Xu – The University of Chicago
- Alkesh Yadav – Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Byron Yu – Carnegie Mellon University
Participants - Geometry Conference
October 26 – 28, 2026 | C͟l͟i͟c͟k͟ H͟e͟r͟e͟ f͟o͟r͟ W͟o͟r͟k͟s͟h͟o͟p͟ W͟e͟b͟p͟a͟g͟e͟
Organizers
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Samuel (Sam) Muscinelli – University of Chicago
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Ramon Nogueira – University of Chicago
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Andrew Fink – Northwestern University
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James Fitzgerald – Northwestern University
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Carina Curto – Brown University
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David Lipshutz – Baylor College of Medicine
Participants
(Invitation accepted as of August 19, 2026)
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Antonio Auffinger – Northwestern University
- Hannah Choi – Georgia Tech
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Ben Dunn – NTNU
- Eva Dyer – University of Pennsylvania
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Daniela Egas Santander – Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG)
- Jenelle Feather – Carnegie Mellon University
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Rainer Friedrich – Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research
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Kenneth Harris – University College London
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Nikolaus Kriegeskorte – Columbia University
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Bruno Olshausen – UC Berkeley
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Adrien Peyrache – McGill University
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Ruben Portugues – Cornell University
- Lorenzo Posani – Paris Brain Institute (ICM)
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Andrew Saxe – University College London
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Carl Schoonover – Allen Institute
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Tatyana Sharpee – Salk Institute
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Alex Williams – New York University
Participants - Probability Conference
November 2 – 4, 2026 | C͟l͟i͟c͟k͟ H͟e͟r͟e͟ f͟o͟r͟ W͟o͟r͟k͟s͟h͟o͟p͟ W͟e͟b͟p͟a͟g͟e͟
Organizers
- Adrienne Fairhall, University of Washington
- Dmitri Chklovskii, Flatiron Institute
- Joshua Glaser, Northwestern University
- Andrew Miri, Northwestern University
- Stephanie Palmer, University of Chicago
- Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan, University of Chicago
Participants
- Athena Akrami – University College London
- Manov Arora – New Jersey Institute of Technology
- Omri Barak – Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology
- Carlos Brody – Princeton University
- Jenna Cohen – University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
- Christine Constantinople – New York University
- Tahra Eissa – University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine
- Andrew J.P. Fink – Northwestern University
- James Fitzgerald – Northwestern University
- Loren Frank – University of California San Francisco
- Maria Geffen – University of Pennsylvania
- Dileep George – Astera Institute
- Akanksha Gupta – Aix-Marseille University
- Arash Jamshidpey – University of California Berkeley
- Shawn Khanna – Brown University
- Savik Kinger – Yale University
- Máté Lengyel – University of Cambridge
- Chris Lynn – Yale University
- Leenoy Meshulam – Brown University
- Zachary “Xaq” Pitkow – Carnegie Mellon University
- Luisa Ramirez Ochoa – Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz
- Bennet Sakelaris – Sorbonne University
- Eryn Sale – University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
- Carl Schoonover – Allen Brain Institute
- Abdul “AB” Sirajudeen – University of Houston
- Murugan Varadhan – Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India
- Chonwen Wang – Harvard University
- Siwei Wang – Stony Brook University
- Bakhtiyar “Bahti” Zakirov – Institute of Science and Technology Austria
- Ling-Qi Zhang – HHMI Janelia Research Campus
- Wenhao Zhang – University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center