A two
-week Hands-on Workshop on Computational Approaches to Memory and Plasticity (CAMP) was held at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore as a summer school on the theory and simulation of learning, memory and plasticity in the brain. With International participants, the school hosts around 30 PhD students annually to be trained by experts in the field of learning, plasticity and computational neuroscience. Like last year, Amrita School of Biotechnology’s Computational Neuroscience Lab researchers Sandeep Bodda and Chaitanya Kumar were selected from within the country and participated at the CAMP event. After returning, Chaitanya Kumar reported, “We are sure this experience with key accomplished neuroscientists like Ad Aertsen (Bernstein Center, Freiburg),Dan Johnston (UT-Austin), Sumantra Chattarji (NCBS, Bangalore), Suhita Nadkarni (IISER, Pune), Rishikesh Narayanan (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore), Michael Hausser (UCL, London), Arvind Kumar (KTH, Stockholm), Raghav Rajan (IISER, Pune), has augmented dimensions to our current study in computational Neuroscience.”
Apart Amrita students, young researchers were selected from around the globe including various institutes namely IIT Bombay, JNU, IIT Madras, Max Planck Institute- Frankfurt, University of Tartu.
As part of the course work,Sandeep took up a mini project on directional selectivity attributed to Wilfrid Rall,via a reconstruction of a realistic pyramidal cell neuromorphology, exploring the parametric space and Chaitanya worked on how plasticity and learning happened in cerebellum and how the pre- and post-synaptic neurons processed information modulating the timing via firing mechanisms.
This adds to the community building around young researchers in computational neuroscience, said the Computational Neuroscience and Neurophysiology Lab head, Dr. Shyam Diwakar who has been working on cerebellum, plasticity for understanding physiological disorders and applications of real brain circuit models for robotic applications. He added that this workshop enhanced the role and perspectives of a challenging career option for participants and expressed gratitude to the CAMP 2015 organizers.
