For those of you interested in the mysteries of the brain, Brain Day is a day-long event full of curiosity and brainy discussion. From psychology, computation, neuroscience to philosophy, UW’s Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience (CTN) has been hosting internationally renowned researchers since 2007. 

On April 7, the 17th annual Brain Day will take place in DC 1302. It is a free event with no registration required. Reza Ramezan is an associate professor in the department of statistics and actuarial science and the chair organizer this year. He encourages anyone who is interested in the brain to attend, “no matter which faculty, which program.” The event is open to the public, welcoming students, faculty, and the broader Waterloo community. 

This year, the speakers are Jeffrey Schall from York University, Robert Kass from Carnegie Mellon University, Michale Fee from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and John Heil from Washington University. Topics will range from training monkeys to perform visual search tasks, identifying interactions among neural populations, studying songbirds’ auditory memory, to exploring the explanatory gap in the philosophy of mind.

CTN’s founding director Chris Eliasmith noted how Brain Day started as a premier event to expose the Waterloo community to world class research in CTN’s areas of focus. In pursuing this, Brain Day has been a collaborative effort with UW staff and faculty members. “I feel proud to be associated with this because I think we have done really well… exposing our UW community to the fantastic work these people do outside UW. It is just phenomenal we have been able to bring all these researchers to campus,” Ramezan said. 

Considering the interdisciplinary field of neuroscience, Ramezan highlighted how Brain Day allows people from various backgrounds to gather and converse. “You usually don’t get to attend an event [where] people talk about the same thing — the same organ — but from very different backgrounds,” he said. The Q and A session after each talk opens the conversation to the audience, bringing more perspectives to the table. 

“I look forward to seeing our students, our postdocs, [and] our faculty interact with each other and with these renowned researchers. And maybe sparks come up, maybe collaborations form… I very much look forward to observing and absorbing all of that when I watch people enjoying the day,” Ramezan said. For more details, see the CTN’s webpage here.