Dynamic Brain workshop at Friday Harbor

It was such a great please to teach at Dynamic Brain Workshop this year! During 2 weeks the students were analyzing the brain data packaged and pre-processed at Allen Brain Science Institute. The datasets included the electron microscopy data how neurons are connected, the brain observatory data showing the activity of mouse visual cortex and even newly available behavioral data when the mice were trained to distinguish images.

On the technical side all computations were located on AWS, which allowed students to run serious computations that could not be possible on their local computers. Putting the data on AWS and creating the infrastructure required the substantial amount of work of our engineers and scientists.

It is highly rewarding to see the young minds working on the brain data to uncover the complexity of its organization and its function. We taught students the principles of open science and team work. Given the complexity of modern science, it is necessary to work together, which is not always well explained in academic institutions.

I hope that by working together we will manage to solve the complexities of how does the brain work, which would help us to create better devices and find a better treatment for certain diseases. This challenge is very complicated to solve by small labs and requires the involvement of the global community of neuroscientists. The workshops like this help to establish closer connections between researchers, so they could work together more efficiently in the future. Only together we could solve the brain.