The Picower Institute Fall 2026 Symposium: Comparative Neuroscience: Lessons from Biodiversity

The Picower Institute Fall 2026 Symposium "Comparative Neuroscience: Lessons from Biodiversity" 

• Date: Wednesday, November 4, 2026
• Time: 9:00am-5:00pm
• Room: Singleton Auditorium (46-3002, Third Fl of MIT Building 46)
• Address: 43 Vassar St, Cambridge, MA 02139
• Faculty Organizer: Brady Weissbourd
• Registration: Free but required. Click here to register.
• Please Note: This event is in-person only.

Animal behavior is incredibly diverse, from insect to human societies; from jellyfish jet propulsion to flying bats. This symposium will bring together scientists with distinct perspectives to examine how nervous systems are organized across species and how these organizational principles relate to mechanisms of nervous system evolution. We will explore questions such as: to what extent do diverse nervous systems share common principles, and when they do, why? What can we learn from species differences? - for example, why are some brains more regenerative than others? How does evolution alter the nervous system to generate novel behaviors? - and how do we compare neural networks across species and levels of complexity to ask such questions? With speakers ranging from evolutionary biology to computational neuroscience, we expect this to be an exciting and thought-provoking day of science.

Speakers:

Herwig Baier, Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence

Adrienne Fairhall, University of Washington

Oliver Hobert, HHMI, Columbia University

Daniel Kronauer, HHMI, The Rockefeller University

Kanaka Rajan, Harvard University

Vanessa Ruta, HHMI, The Rockefeller University

Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Brady Weissbourd, The Picower Institute, MIT

Jessica L. Whited, Harvard University

Michael Yartsev, HHMI, UC Berkeley

Tentative Schedule (please note that this is subject to change)