2025/26 Neuroscience Research Colloquium Schedule

FALL 2025

SEPTEMBER 12

  • Host:  Daniel Ramandi
  • Speaker: Dr. Bence Olevczky, Harvard University
  • Title: Neural circuits underlying learned motor sequences.

Our ability to sequence movements and actions in response to unpredictable environmental events underlies our rich and adaptive behavioral repertoire. Such flexible behaviors contrast with overtrained, or automatic, motor sequences directed at specific tasks and executed the same way every time. We probed how neural circuits underlie these distinct forms of motor sequence execution by training rats on a ‘piano task’ in which the same motor sequence can be generated in response to unpredictable cues or overtrained to the point of automaticity. By measuring and manipulating neural activity in motor cortex and sensorimotor striatum, we delineate the logic by which these circuits combine to generate both flexible and automatic motor sequences.

SEPTEMBER 19

  • Host:  Dr. Mark Cembrowski
  • Speaker: Dr. Matthew Hill, University of Calgary
  • Title: Amygdalar Regulation of Neuroendocrine and Behavioral Responses to Threat and Stress

While the basolateral amygdala (BLA)  is known to be a highly stress sensitive region of the brain, there is surprisingly little understanding of the role the BLA plays in the orchestration of a stress response. The first portion of this talk will focus on the role of the BLA in regulating neuroendocrine responses to stress, and how differential projection neuron populations in the BLA are stress sensitive and have diverse anatomical organization. The second arm of this talk will examine the role of the BLA in modulating behavioral responses, in a sex specific manner, to a dynamic threat based environment with a robotic predator.

SEPTEMBER 26

  • Host: Dr. Annie Ciernia
  • Speaker:  Dr. Adrienne Antonson, University of Illinois
  • Title: Blueprint for the Developing Brain: Cues from Microbes, Myeloid Cells, and the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Emerging evidence suggests that key neurodevelopmental processes are shaped by immune and microbial signals during the prenatal period. My work is based on the premise that disruptions to these signals can alter neurodevelopmental trajectories and increase vulnerability to lifelong mental health disorders. Using a clinically translatable mouse model of maternal influenza infection, we demonstrate that prenatal inflammatory insults compromise vascular integrity in both the placenta and fetal brain, allowing bloodborne molecules to cross transplacental and blood-brain barriers. These changes are associated with cortical thinning, altered fetal microglia and meningeal macrophage signaling, and shifts in circulating maternal and fetal microbial metabolites. Together, these findings highlight converging pathways through which maternal inflammation may influence fetal brain development and long-term psychiatric risk.

OCTOBER 3

  • Host:  Dr. Mark Cembrowski
  • Speaker: Dr. Erik Bloss, The Jackson Laboratory
  • Title: Synapse plasticity in learning and disease states

Synapses are the computational subunits of the brain. They allow cell-type specific forms of information flow, permit neurons to compartmentalize electrical and biochemical signals, and undergo rapid structural plasticity during experience. Although Crick suggested spine plasticity was a correlate of memory more than 40 years ago, it has been hard to understand precisely how the plasticity of spines drives cognitive function. We have examined this issue in two contexts: one in which mice are required to learn competing memory traces, and one in which mice are engineered to express mutant amyloid as a model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). I will present unpublished data that suggest adaptive learning requires spine plasticity in specific cortical neurons, at specific synaptic sites, and in a sex-specific manner. In AD mice, the loss of synapses appears to coincide with interference between memory traces. These results suggest new ways in which plasticity might support memory functions.

OCTOBER 24

  • Host: Daniel Ramandi
  • Speaker: Dr. Nicolas Tritsch, McGill University
  • Title: Dopamine and Movement: Defining Timescales of Modulation

Ever since the discovery that the degeneration of midbrain DA neurons (mDANs) projecting to the striatum underlies bradykinesia (i.e., slowness of movement) in Parkinson’s disease (PD), DA has become synonymous with motor vigor. However, the mechanisms through which DA contributes to the speed and amplitude of individual voluntary movements are still debated. Initial investigations suggested a somewhat slow or permissive role for DA, but recent experiments in rodents proposed a stronger and faster role for DA in the dynamic control of the gain of motor commands. In this presentation, I will describe our attempts at better understanding how dopamine contributes to motor vigor through the study of release patterns, lesions, and optogenetic and pharmacological manipulations. Our findings call into question the widely-held view that phasic fluctuations in extracellular dopamine control the vigor of ongoing movements, constraining the kinds of mechanisms and timescales that dopamine likely acts on to modify behavior.

OCTOBER 31

  • Host:  Harjeev Sudan, on behalf of the Neuroscience Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee
  • Speaker: Dr. Michael Yellow Bird, University of Manitoba
  • Title: The Power of Ceremony: Indigenous Contemplative Practices, Neurodecolonization, and the Medicine Wheel

Indigenous contemplative practices and teachings have enabled Indigenous Peoples to develop an important paradigm of healing that has important implications for western medicine and health care providers who work with Indigenous Peoples. In this presentation, Dr. Michael Yellow Bird uses Indigenous wisdom and western science to show how Indigenous contemplative approaches can create important changes in the brain and body and can prevent, heal, and cure, many emotional and physical diseases brought about by colonization and the current Western industrial lifestyle.

NOVEMBER 7  

  • Host: Dr. Corree Laule
  • Speaker: Dr. Bruce Pike, University of Calgary
  • Title: MRI Guided Transcranial Focused Ultrasound

The integration of MRI and transcranial focused ultrasound represents a disruptive technology that has many potential applications.  This seminar will provide an overview of a new research program I established in this area that has three major research themes: neurosurgery, drug delivery, and neuromodulation.  Methods, applications, and progress in each of these areas will be reviewed and future research opportunities highlighted.

DECEMBER 5

  • Host:  Dr. Shernaz Bamji
  • Speaker: Dr. Jean-Claude Béique, University of Ottawa
  • Title:  A tale of serotonin’s value: from release dynamics to behavioral regulation

Our lab seeks to gain granular descriptions of synaptic, neuronal and network dynamics in the brain. To this end, we use a combination of in vitro and in vivo electrophysiology, two-photon imaging/uncaging, optogenetics and behavioral approaches, and use computational simulations to coalesce these levels of analysis in tractable interpretations. I will present results from ongoing work aimed at identifying unifying roles for the neuromodulator serotonin. I will show data supporting the idea that serotonin neurons located in the raphe encodes an estimate of cumulative future rewards, a quantity referred to as value in reinforcement learning. We further identified unsuspected network organization and serotonin release dynamics in the raphe that, collectively, impart highly non-linearly processing features of long-range synaptic inputs and behavioral regulation. Collectively, this work is beginning to identify elemental computations that may be involved in animal’s ability to optimally adapt their behavioral policies to changing environmental contexts.

TERM 2

(WINTER 2026)

JANUARY 16

  • Host:  Dr. Adele Diamond
  • Speaker: Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California
  • Title:  Longitudinal neurodevelopmental correlates of mid-adolescents’ psychosocial processing: A path to young adult wellbeing?

Combining open-ended interviews (outside the scanner) with structural, trial-by-trial, and resting-state functional MRI neuroimaging, we examined real-time functional neural dynamics underlying diverse urban mid-adolescents’ cognitive and emotional engagement with compelling social stories at two time-points, two years apart. We found that the patterns of longitudinal change in neural network dynamics predicted psychosocial outcomes five years later in young adulthood.

We found that “transcendent thinking” – seeing situations not just in terms of X happened to person A, which makes me feel thusly, but in terms of the larger societal and contextual forces that shaped how Person A was treated and how Person A reacted, the broader implications and lessons one can draw from that situation, and the larger issues it exemplifies or reveals—correlated with a particular set of neural activity dynamics and predicted future structural and functional neural development across the subsequent two years, controlling for the starting state of neural development, and independent of IQ and SES. Transcendent thinking also countered negative effects of exposure to community violence on structural brain development.

The neural development predicted by transcendent thinking (the changes in the brain across the 2-year period) in turn predicted young adult identity strength, self-liking, relationship satisfaction, and achievement 5 years later.

These findings reveal a novel predictor of neural development across mid-adolescence, and underscore the active role adolescents play in their own brain development through the meaning they make of the social world.

JANUARY 23

  • Host: Dr. Jason Snyder
  • Speaker: Dr. Milan Valyear- UBC
  • Title: Rewards, errors, and the disentangling of striatal functions.

Successful pursuit of reinforcers requires the generation of predictions and evaluation of outcomes. Midbrain dopamine neurons and their projections to the striatum are thought to be critical for these processes. Here, we will consider two narratives: dopamine as a reward signal and dopamine as an error signal. Then we will examine the extent to which these, and other narratives, can be disentangled using new optical tools.

JANUARY 30

  • Host:  Dr. Jason Snyder
  • UBC Kickstart Updates
  • Speakers:
  • Drs. Annie Ciernia, Sheila Teves and Seth Parker: The role of metabolic driven changes in histone lactylation in regulating microglial inflammation.
  • Drs. Deborah Giaschi, Alexander Weber, Hee Yeon-Im, Tamara Vanderwal and Miriam Spering:  New magnetic resonance approaches to understanding developmental visual disorders.
  • Drs. Thalia Field and Jill Zwicker: Assessing long-term trajectories of brain structure, neurodevelopment and function in adolescents with complex congenital heart disease.

FEBRUARY 6

  • Host: Ava Momeni
  • Speaker: Dr. Donna Rose Addis,  University of Toronto
  • Title:  The Prospective Brain: Past and Future

The human brain has the remarkable capacity to transport the self into the past and future. While previously thought of as distinct functions, recent research has shown that memory for past events and imagination of future events rely on the same brain networks. In this talk, I will present neuroimaging and neuropsychological research demonstrating the overlap between remembering and imagining, the unique properties of our ability to foresee the future, and how these abilities are affected by memory impairment.

FEBRUARY 13

  • Host: Dr. Jason Snyder
  • UBC Kickstart Updates
  • Speakers:
  • Drs. Jason Snyder and Manu Madhav:  Experience-specific tuning of postnatally-born hippocampal neurons.
  • Drs. Shernaz Bamji and Jacqueline Quandt: Validating ZDHHC9 as a therapeutic target for Multiple Sclerosis.

FEBRUARY 20

  • Host: Dr. Jason Snyder
  • Speaker: Dr. Sheena Josselyn, Hospital for Sick Kids, University of Toronto
  • Title: Engrams and Memory in Mice.

Understanding how the brain encodes, stores, and uses information is a central goal of neuroscience. Many neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and Alzheimer’s disease, may arise from disrupted information processing. Thus, uncovering the neural mechanisms by which information is represented in the brain is not only key to understanding normal cognition but also essential for developing targeted therapeutic strategies.

Memory can be defined as the persistence of internal representations acquired through experience, and the capacity to reconstruct these representations across time. The enduring physical changes in the brain that encode such information are referred to as engrams. Although the idea of a physical memory trace can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy, it was not formally articulated until 1904 when Richard Semon coined the term engram. Despite this long conceptual history, identifying the precise neural substrates of an engram has proven remarkably difficult, in part because memory is encoded across multiple levels; from epigenetic and synaptic modifications to coordinated patterns of neuronal ensemble activity.

Our laboratory seeks to understand how specific neurons are recruited, or allocated, to a given engram, and how membership within these neuronal ensembles may evolve with time, plasticity, or new learning. By combining molecular, imaging, and behavioral approaches in mice, we aim to link changes in neuronal excitability and network dynamics to the stability and flexibility of memory representations. In my lecture, I will describe our historic and recent findings toward mapping and manipulating memory engrams in the mammalian brain, and discuss their implications for understanding both healthy and disordered memory.

FEBRUARY 27

  • Host: Dr. Christian Schuetz
  • Speaker: Dr. Leah Mayo, University of Calgary
  • Title: Lost in translation? Exploring the endocannabinoid system as a novel pharmacotherapeutic target in PTSD

Dr. Mayo will talk about studies involving animal-to-human translational work highlighting how endocannabinoid function regulates stress reactivity and fear learning, leveraging human behavioral pharmacology and neuroimaging. She will also highlight outcomes from a recent clinical trial exploring how augmenting cannabinoid function impacts clinical, behavioral, and neural measures in people with PTSD.

MARCH 6 

  • Host: Dr. Doug Altshuler
  • Speaker: Dr, Cris Niell, University of Oregon
  • Title: Neural circuits for natural vision

Natural visual processing entails a complex interplay between sensory input, behavioral context, and on-going brain dynamics. Our lab seeks to understand how these processes give rise to goal-directed visual behaviors, by exploring the neural circuits mediating ethologically relevant behaviors that laboratory mice perform, including prey capture and distance estimation. We are also implementing novel experimental approaches to investigate neural coding of the visual scene as animals freely move through their environment. Finally, I will present a new research direction studying the completely different, yet largely unexplored, visual system of the octopus.

MARCH 13 

  • Host: Larissa Kraus
  • Speaker: Dr. Keri Martinowich, Johns Hopkins University
  • Title: Spatially-resolved molecular approaches for understanding human brain circuits and disease vulnerability

This talk will highlight recent efforts to generate and analyze spatially resolved molecular datasets to better understand structure–function relationships in the human brain, particularly in the context of complex brain disorders. While single-cell and single-nucleus sequencing approaches have rapidly advanced our ability to define molecularly distinct cell populations, these methods often lack the spatial and circuit context necessary to interpret how cells interact within intact brain tissue. I will describe integrative strategies that combine spatial transcriptomics, single-cell genomics, and data-driven computational approaches to define molecularly distinct spatial domains within human brain regions, map cell–cell and circuit-level interactions across these domains, and identify enrichment of disease-associated molecular profiles in specific cellular and spatial contexts. Across examples from cortical and subcortical circuits, these approaches provide a framework for understanding how molecular heterogeneity is organized in space and how this organization may confer selective vulnerability in neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disease.

MARCH 20 

  • Host: Dr. Amani Hariri
  • Speaker: Dr. Stephan Lammel, University of California at Berkely
  • Title: Neural Dynamics of Dopamine Neurons in Motivated Behavior

Despite decades of research on the properties of ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons, the precise information encoded by these cells in reward learning and motivated behavior remains uncertain. In this talk, I will describe recent work investigating two distinct modalities of the midbrain dopamine system at different levels of investigation. First, I will present work leveraging an approach that combines Neuropixels recordings and optogenetics to examine dopamine neurons at the single-cell level. In conjunction with computational modeling, we explored the neural dynamics of dopamine subpopulations across different VTA subregions in mice performing a reward-seeking task. Second, I will discuss a neural mechanism that explains why a chronic high-fat diet paradoxically diminishes the desire for high-fat, sugary foods, even when these foods are easily accessible. We found that this reduction in desire is attributed to decreased neurotensin signaling from nucleus accumbens inputs to dopamine neurons in the lateral VTA. We propose that restoring this desire, either through dietary modifications or by enhancing neurotensin expression and release, can drive changes in eating behavior and promote weight loss. Together, our experiments are geared towards developing comprehensive frameworks for understanding dopamine’s diverse roles in behavior.

MARCH 27

  • Host: Dr. Christian Schuetz
  • Speaker: Dr. Hamed Ekhtiari, Laureate Institute for Brain Research
  • Title:TBD

APRIL 10

  • Host:  Dr. Jason Snyder
  • Speaker:  Dr. Mark Brandon, The Douglas Research Centre, McGill University
  • Title: Stability and drift in neural representations

How does the brain maintain stable internal representations of the world while also remaining flexible enough to learn, adapt, and predict the future?  This is a central question in systems neuroscience.  In this talk, I will present recent work from my lab that addresses this problem at both the level of network dynamics and the level of single-neuron coding.

First I will focus on the head direction system and the concept of network gain as a control parameter that regulates how strongly external landmarks can realign an internal directional attractor during reorientation.  I will describe new data and models that begin to reveal the circuit mechanisms that may tune this gain signal in different behavioral contexts.

I will then turn to hippocampal representations across days. Using chronic recordings, we find that not all place cells drift.  In one set of experiments, a majority of cells whose firing is constrained by environmental geometry can remain remarkably stable across sessions, whereas other cells show substantial drift.  In a separate set of experiments, we identify a distinct population of reward coding neurons whose drift is not random but highly organized, showing a systematic backward shift over learning as an activity transitions from encoding current outcomes to predicting future reward locations. Together, these studies begin to specify when neural representations are stable, when they change, and how that change can follow precise trajectories rather than random wander, providing concrete constraints for models of long-term spatial memory and its disruption in disease.

APRIL 17 

  • Host: Lily Aleksandrova
  • Speaker: Dr. Kelly Dunn, University of Maryland
  • Title: How Can Differences in Opioid Withdrawal Inform New Treatment Strategies?

This presentation will review the need for a precision medicine approach to opioid withdrawal and illustrate how variability in withdrawal symptom expression would inform novel treatment strategies. Differences in withdrawal presentation as a result of illicit fentanyl exposure will be reviewed and results from a randomized trial comparison of a new medication for withdrawal management will be presented.

APRIL 24 

  • Host:
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MAY 1

  • Host:  Dr. Rebecca Todd
  • Speaker: Dr. Guillaume Dumas, University of Montreal
  • Title: Multi-Brain Neuroscience: from Generative Neurophenomenology to Inter-Personalized Psychiatry

Human cognition and mental health do not arise from the brain alone, but from continuous interactions among people, bodies, and social environments. This talk introduces a multi-brain perspective on neuroscience that connects research on consciousness with new directions in psychiatry. Using recent advances that enable multiple brains to be recorded simultaneously, we explore how everyday social interactions, such as conversation, cooperation, and shared attention, give rise to coordinated patterns of brain activity across individuals. These patterns reflect how people align emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally during real-world interactions.

Building on these insights, the talk argues for a shift in how we think about mental health. Rather than focusing solely on what happens inside an individual’s brain, we propose an embodied and relational view in which well-being and vulnerability depend on the quality of interactions with others. Changes in how brains coordinate during social exchanges have been linked to a range of psychiatric conditions, suggesting that mental health is shaped by relationships as much as by biology. Inter-personalized psychiatry extends this idea by considering diagnosis and intervention at the level of pairs, families, and groups, integrating brain mechanisms with lived social experience.

Overall, this work highlights how studying brains in interaction can deepen our understanding of consciousness, inform more socially grounded approaches to mental health, and open new paths for clinical research and practice.

MAY 8

  • Host: Dr. Kota Mizumoto
  • Speaker: Dr. Kelsie Eichel, University of Colorado, Boulder
  • Title: TBD

MAY 15 

  • Host: Dr. Todd Woodward
  • Speaker: Dr. Christian Ruff, University of Zurich
  • Title: TBD

MAY 29

  • Host: Sarah Ebert
  • Speaker:  Dr. Jennifer Gommerman, University of Toronto
  • Title: Targeting B cells in MS – understanding mechanisms of action.

I will be presenting data on an animal model of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) progression, how we have used this model to better understand disease progression and to understand how MS treatments impact this process. By going back and forth between the animal model and MS tissues, we have learned about what can trigger so-called “compartmentalized inflammation” in MS, and have unveiled a potential fluid biomarker that reflects this inflammation.

JUNE 5 

  • Host: Jason Snyder
  • Speaker: Jeff leDue and Sophie Stukas
  • Title: Core Facilities Showcase: NINC (NeuroImaging and NeuroComputation Core) and CNFBI (Core Facility for Neurology Biomarker Innovation)