The NEURON School

“Making computation a core part of neurobiology curricula should be high on the agenda at every university.”
Nature Neuroscience 19: 347, 2016

Computational neuroscience

is a rapidly expanding subject focused on understanding and modeling the brain while helping to design and interpret future experiments. However, very few institutions have a “computational neuroscience” program and therefore, getting into this field may prove difficult, especially for students outside the fields of theoretical neuroscience.

The NEURON School was started in 2018 with the goal to fill this gap, providing students with a solid introduction to neuronal modeling teaching the central ideas, methods, and practices of computational neuroscience through a combination of lectures and hands-on work. Further, since the School program focuses on the description of biologically realistic neurons, an important secondary goal of the School is to help students cross the traditional discipline boundaries that most are trained in, and serve as a bridge between experimental and theoretical neuroscientists.

During the course’s mornings, distinguished international faculty will deliver lectures on selected topics of experimental and computational neuroscience. In the afternoons, students will learn how to use the NEURON simulator to create neural models, under the supervision of expert tutors and faculty. Students will work in small groups on a mini-research project, under the supervision of the school tutors, to be presented at the end of the school.