The Neuroscience Institute is honored to host distinguished lecturers on research topics that include cognitive, systems, or computational neuroscience or neuro-tech and engineering.
Upcoming Speakers
Dr. Amy Orsborn
Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Associate Professor, University of Washington
Summary: The motor system is redundant at every level. Our bodies have more degrees of freedom than most tasks require, and motor cortices contain far more neurons than muscles. At each level, the nervous system must solve the "credit assignment" problem to learn which dimensions matter for behavior. Similar learning computations arise in Brain– computer interfaces (BCIs), where algorithms map high-dimensional neural activity to a few dimensions of movement, defining which neural patterns are task-relevant. In this talk, I'll first present behavioral experiments using a redundant hand-to-cursor mapping, which reveal that learning within a known task-relevant space and learning when task relevance changes involve distinct learning processes. I'll then present large-scale recordings across frontal motor cortex, which show that task information is carried by a sub-population of neurons with shared dynamics that are spatially distributed, rather than by any single region. Together, this work highlights the importance of understanding how the brain learns and represents what matters for a task, and opens new considerations for guiding implant targeting and algorithm design for BCI.
November 5th, 2026 11:15 AM Mellon Institute: Room 348
Previous Speakers
Dr. Pawan Sinha, Professor, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
October 15th, 2026
Project Prakash: Merging Service and Science
Summary: Summary: Of the estimated one million blind children worldwide, over 80% live in low- and middle-
income countries. For many, limited access to medical care results in years of unnecessary blindness, even when their condition is surgically treatable. Project Prakash was founded to address this humanitarian need while simultaneously pursuing a fundamental scientific question: How does the human brain learn to see? Through rural ophthalmic screening programs in India, Project Prakash identifies children with
treatable blindness and provides them with high-quality sight-restoring surgery at no cost to their families. The onset of sight after years of congenital blindness creates a rare scientific opportunity - by following these children longitudinally, we can investigate how the brain learns to extract structure and meaning from visual information, whether and how different perceptual abilities
emerge, and how the potential for neural plasticity changes across development. This talk will describe Project Prakash's integration of medical service and scientific discovery and present findings from behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies of children gaining
sight after prolonged blindness. These studies reveal both notable capacities for visual learning and enduring consequences of early deprivation, providing insights into the mechanisms and limits of human brain plasticity. More broadly, Project Prakash illustrates how addressing an urgent societal need can itself create opportunities for fundamental scientific discovery that, in time, may help improve interventions for children with sensory and developmental disorders.
Dr. Tim Behrens, Professor of Computational Neuroscience, University of Oxford
October 8th, 2026
How does the front of the brain work?
Abstract: I have spent most of my life giving quite deep talks that describe a particular experimental findings in some detail, with a bit of fluff round the edges to place it within the field. I used to think this is what scientists should do. I grew up watching Peter Dayan do this, and if you're going to copy anyone, I figured you should copy Peter Dayan. The audience should be able to understand every piece of your data from the talk. But then i went to Cosyne this year and watched Mark Churchland and Ile Fiete give keynotes. They have broad overviews that summarised their overall views of the field. I don't think anyone really understood the details of any of the data, except people who already knew it, but people left with an exciting feeling of having discovered a new set of ideas. To be honest, I was a bit jealous of them. So I thought I would try to write one of those talks for y'all (is that what you say in America?). So this talk is a bit of a tour. It is a tour across models and ideas, across species and techniques, about how our brains build models for the world, and uses them to control our behaviour. It focuses on the frontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe. It shoes a few of my greatest hits,but also covers a lot of upcoming work and the latest thinking in the lab. I hope you will be a bit frustrated by every piece of th talk, but somehow by the end you will emerge with a deep sense of overall satisfaction, and maybe even enjoyed yourself.
Dr. Roozbeh Kiani, Professor, Neural Science and Psychology, New York University
October 1, 2026
Summary: Flexible behavior requires flexible decision-making. We adapt seamlessly to changing environments—adjusting biases, altering decision rules, and inferring hidden task contexts—often without explicit cues. In this talk, I will outline a framework that formalizes different levels of this flexibility and show how these adjustments are implemented in neural codes across the frontoparietal cortex. I will highlight three forms of decision flexibility: (1) Bias adjustments, driven by asymmetric rewards, shift neural activity along the decision variable axis; (2) Rule changes, such as varying sensory weights in a multi-feature discrimination task, produce rotational changes in the population geometry, supporting rapid changes in decision policy; and (3) Hierarchical inference, where animals infer hidden contexts to adapt to task structure, is reflected in the emergence of latent variables represented in distributed subspaces.
Dr. Helen Mayberg, MD. Director, Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
March 19, 2026
Theory to practice: Decoding Multimodal Recovery Signals to Optimize DBS for Depression
Summary: Deep Brain Stimulation is an experimental treatment for intractable depression. Next-generation technologies now provide real-time tracking of neural activity from the implanted device and combined with advances in neuroimaging, computer vision and machine learning strategies, enable neural and behavioral monitoring and during ongoing DBS. Such studies work to link first-person experiences to changes in brain state and naturalistic behaviors, and a mechanistic approach towards a comprehensive understanding of illness, recovery and resilience.
Dr. Adrienne Fairhall, Professor, Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington
February 12, 2026
In Search of Mental Models
Mental models allow us to organize information about the world into an abstract structure that facilitates decision-making and further learning. How are such models represented in the brain? I will discuss work in collaboration with Beth Buffalo, and our progress in evaluating the structure of mental models from neural recordings of nonhuman primates performing schema-based tasks.
Dr. Annegret Falkner
December 11, 2025
Annegret Falkner is an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She earned her PhD from Columbia University, and her research focuses on neural circuits for social decision-making. Her lab is interested in how social experience and internal state shapes sensory perception and social motivation in order to influence behavioral choice. Specifically, it focuses on understanding the interplay between circuit nodes in the brain’s “social decision-making network,” areas in the hypothalamus, amygdala, and midbrain that process social-sensory information and drive social behaviors. Her lab uses genetic tools in mice in tandem with in vivo physiology and optical recording strategies to probe how activity in these networks changes as a function of experience and neuromodulatory and hormonal influences.
David Robbe
May 7, 2025
David Robbe is an INSERM research director and leads the ‘Cortico-Basal Ganglia Circuits and Behaviour’ team at the Institute of Neurobiology of the Mediterranean (INMED, Marseille). After completing his PhD in Montpellier on the molecular determinants of synaptic plasticity in the ventral striatum, David Robbe did his postdoc in Gyorgy Buzsaki’s lab where is studied study the relationship between neuronal population dynamics in the hippocampus and spatial memory. David Robbe then led a research team in Barcelona as part of the Ramon-y-Cajal program before joining INMED in 2012.
Tom Griffiths
April 24, 2025
Tom Griffiths is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture in the Departments of Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton University. His research explores connections between human and machine learning, using ideas from statistics and artificial intelligence to understand how people solve the challenging computational problems they encounter in everyday life. He has made contributions to the development of Bayesian models of cognition, probabilistic machine learning, nonparametric Bayesian statistics, and models of cultural evolution, and his recent work has demonstrated how methods from cognitive science can shed light on modern artificial intelligence systems. Tom completed his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University in 2005, and taught at Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley before moving to Princeton. He has received awards for his research from organizations ranging from the American Psychological Association to the National Academy of Sciences and is a co-author of the book Algorithms to Live By, introducing ideas from computer science and cognitive science to a general audience.
Tatiana Engel
March 20th, 2025
Tatiana Engel is an Assistant Professor, Princeton University Neuroscience Institute. Her talks is about unifying neural population dynamics, manifold geometry, and single-cell selectivity.
Andrew Pruszynski, Western
December 5, 2024
Eva Dyer, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech
October 10th, 2024
Talk Title: Large-scale pretraining on neural data allows for transfer across individuals, tasks and species
As neuroscience datasets grow in size and complexity, integrating diverse data sources to achieve a comprehensive understanding of brain function presents both an opportunity and a challenge. In this talk, I will introduce our approach to developing a multi-source foundation model for neuroscience, utilizing large-scale pretraining on neural data from various tasks, brain regions, and species. This model is designed to enable seamless transfer learning across individuals, tasks, and species, thereby enhancing data efficiency and advancing the capabilities of neural decoding technologies. By integrating diverse datasets, our aim is to uncover the common neural functions that underlie a wide range of tasks and brain regions, providing a deeper understanding of brain function and informing future brain-machine interface applications.
Anne Churchland, Professor of Neurobiology, UCLA
January 18, 2024
Talk Title: Movements and engagement during decision-making
Jörn Diedrichsen, Western Research Chair for Motor Control and Computational Neuroscience Brain and Mind Institute, Department for Computer Science, Department for Statistical and Actuarial Sciences
University of Western Ontario
November 16, 2023
Talk Title: What is the function of the human cerebellum? Studying cortico-cerebellar loops across functional domains.
Jonathan Pillow, Professor of Neuroscience, Princeton University
October 26, 2023
Talk Title: New methods for understanding the dynamics of animal decision-making behavior
Location: Mellon Institute Social Room, 328 or Zoom
Jennifer Groh, Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Neurobiology, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering, Duke University. Lab Director of the SPACE Lab
September 28, 2023
Talk Title: Computing the Location(s) of Sounds in the Visual Scene
Stéphanie Lacour, Bertarelli Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology Laboratory of Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces (LSBI), EPFL
May 25, 2023
Li-Huei Tsai, Director, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT Picower Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Senior Associate Member, Broad Institute
April 13, 2023
Talk Title: Uncovering the Role of Alzheimer's Disease Risk Genes Using Stem Cells and Human Brains
Kia Nobre, FBA, MAE, fNASc Chair, Translational Cognitive Neuroscience; Oxford Director, Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity Professional Fellow, St Catherine's College
March 2, 2023
Talk Title: Turning Attention Inside Out
Helen Mayberg, M.D., Professor, Director, Center of Advanced Circuit Therapeutics; Professor, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Neuroscience; Mount Sinai Professor of Neurotherapeutics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
March 24, 2022
Talk Title: Machine Learning Strategies to Track Brain and Behavioral State Changes During DBS Treatment for Depression
Kalanit Grill-Spector, Ph.D. Professor; Department of Psychology Chair, Department of Psychology Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Stanford University, CA
March 17, 2022
Talk Title: Human Visual Cortex as a Window into the Developing Brain.
Daniel Wolpert, FMedSci FRS Professor of Neuroscience Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute Columbia University, New York
March 3, 2022
Talk Title: Contextual inference underlies the learning of sensorimotor repertoires.
Elizabeth A. Buffalo, Ph.D. Professor and Chair Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine; Interim Associate Director for Research, Washington National Primate Research Center
January 27, 2022
Talk Title: Reconciling the Spatial and Mnemonic Views of the Hippocampus
Yael Niv, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Princeton Neuroscience Institute
May 6, 2021
Talk Title: Latent causes, prediction errors, and the organization of memory
Carlos Brody, Wilbur H. Gantz III ’59 Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
April 8, 2021
Talk Title: Neural sources of individual variability in cognitive behavior
Larry Abbott, William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience and Co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Columbia University Principal Investigator, Columbia's Zuckerman Institute
April 1, 2021
Talk Title: Vector computations in the fly brain
Lena H. Ting, John and Jan Portman Professor of Biomedical Engineering, W.H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Division of Physical Therapy, Emory University Co-Director, Georgia Tech and Emory Neural Engineering Centers
March 11, 2021
Talk Title: What does a muscle sense? Multiscale interactions governing muscle spindle sensory signals
Michael Yartsev, Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Engineering, Robertson Investigator, New York Stem Cell Foundation, Helen Wills Institute of Neuroscience Graduate Program, UC Berkeley Biophysics Graduate Program, UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering, University of California at Berkeley
December 3, 2020
Talk Title: Studying the Neural basis of Complex Spatial, Social and Acoustic Behaviors – in Freely Behaving and Flying Bats
Lucas Parra, Harold Shames Professor of Biomedical Engineering, City College of New York (CCNY)
May 7, 2020
Talk Title: Mechanisms and Optimization of Transcranial Electric Stimulation
Edward Chang, Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco
September 17, 2019
Talk Title: The Encoding of Speech Sounds in Human Temporal Lobe