In this “Principles of Neurodevelopment” workshop, we aim to develop conversations between developmental concepts and neurotheory, as well as highlight work that has accelerated our understanding of brain maturation through computational methods.

This workshop will broadly address the mechanisms by which development can establish complex circuit priors, with relevance for RNN and AI weight initializations. The workshop will survey experimental and theoretical works that define the specificity of wiring encoded by developmental programs. It will discuss the technical and analysis challenges that have been (and still need to be) overcome, highlighting directions where theory can accelerate experimental progress.

The goals of this event are to (1) inspire developmental considerations and priors for labs interested in behavior, machine learning, and neural dynamics, (2) offer modeling work that can clarify concepts in development and offer experimental predictions, as already seen at the intersection of computational and system neuroscience, and (3) provide computational resources and insight onto existing and in progress neurodevelopment datasets.

Speakers:
Paola Arlotta (Harvard Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology)
Jeffrey Macklis (Harvard Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology)
Nancy Kanwisher (MIT)
Naomi Shvedov (BU)
Naoki Hiratani (Harvard Center for Brain Science)
Anna Le (Broad)
Sarthak Chandra (MIT)
Harris Kaplan (Harvard Molecular and Cellular Biology)
Alexander van Meegan (Harvard Center for Brain Science)
Shachar Sherman (Harvard Stem Cell Institute)
Nagaraju Dhanyasi (Harvard MCB)