I’m excited that we will be holding the first in-person UMass Interdisciplinary Neurosciences Conference in three years on Thursday, May 26th in the Student Union Ballroom. We have two outstanding keynote speakers, Irina Rish and Tatyana Sharpee who each approach the intersection of Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence from different angles. In addition, we will have five UMass speakers and over 30 posters from researchers at UMass. The merging of the fields of biological and machine learning is an exciting new direction.

We had a great response to our call for Inspiration Award proposals. We received twenty proposals from graduate students and postdocs in ten departments across four colleges for research projects at the interface of neuroscience and either engineering or computer sciences. We will announce the winners of the awards at the Interdisciplinary Neurosciences Conference.

I am also excited to announce that we will be hosting a two-part hands-on workshop by MathWorks on Thursday June 2nd to help researchers use MATLAB to apply Machine Learning to data analysis. We will have a listen and learn informational session on Thursday May 26th at 11am just before the Interdisciplinary Neurosciences Conference.

I’m looking forward to seeing all of you later this month.