tlab and EXITO scholar Nancy reports from her 2022 COSYNE conference attendance.

This spring break, I attended the Computational and Systems Neuroscience conference (Cosyne) 2022 and workshops in Portugal – made possible by teuscher.:Lab and a grant from Cosyne. As an undergraduate, Cosyne set me and a group of other undergraduates up with two post-doc researchers in the field, Shashank Pisupati, and Ugurcan Mugan. They showed us the ropes of attending conference poster sessions, gave advice on graduate school and research, and generally were available to answer my questions and invite me into the community. This was my first in-person conference, while many people I talked to had been attending Cosyne for years. I was told that most researchers involved in computational neuroscience attended this conference.

Before the conference, I’d been following the work of G.R. Yang at The Center for Brains, Minds & Machines (CBMM) at MIT. I didn’t know he would be there, and then suddenly, he was sitting next to me at one of the speaking sessions. I was able to strike up a conversation and talk about the lab’s research with one of his graduate students. I also connected with other PIs, graduates, and post-docs about their work. Additionally, Cosyne arranged a meeting for our undergraduate group with some people from Google’s DeepMind, to get an industry perspective on research.

By attending Cosyne, I made valuable contacts, increased my knowledge of current research and techniques in neuroscience, gained more information on making decisions about graduate school, developed my own ideas on implementing computational models, and experienced Portugal.