I am very excited to announce that after a two year hiatus we will once again host the Interdisciplinary Neurosciences Conference. This year, the talks will be focused on the interface between Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. There will be two outside speakers and five UMass faculty speakers. In addition, as before, we will have an evening poster session. UMass has a historical strength in reinforcement learning. This conference will be a chance for Neuroscientists, Computer Scientists, and Engineers to learn from each other. The conference also dovetails with the IONs Inspiration Awards for Neuroscience & Technology, which is an opportunity for UMass graduate students and postdocs to receive funding for research proposals that use new technology or employ existing methodologies in new ways to address problems in neuroscience or problems inspired by neuroscience. The deadline for application is March 25th.

Regardless of what some groundhog might have seen today, I’m convinced that spring is around the corner. There is so much activity in the Neurosciences that I can feel the community coming back alive after the isolation of the pandemic. This month, Guoping Feng, the Director of the McGovern Institute at MIT will deliver the first in-person Distinguished Neuroscience Lecture in almost two years. Plans are underway to once again hold a UMass Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Conference. This year, the theme will be Neuroscience and AI, which is emerging as an important intersectional field. I am really pleased to announce the Inspiration Awards, which is an opportunity for graduate students and postdocs to propose research that reaches across neuroscience, engineering, and computer science. UMass has tremendous untapped potential. It is our premise that the trainees can help lead the way to future collaborations. Yes, spring is in the air even if there is snow on the ground.

The 19th century physicist, Johann Philipp Gustav von Jolly, is quoted as telling Max Planck “…in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.” Ironically, Planck’s work would help move the field from Newtonian dynamics to Quantum physics. I am fond of saying that neuroscience is in its Newtonian phase; we know all of the parts and how they work. We can explain how photons excite opsins in photoreceptors and how retinal ganglion cells convey the information to the thalamus and how it is transformed in cortex. We know how shapes and colors are encoded by the firing of particular neurons in particular parts of the brain. But we fail to have an explanation about how that activity causes you to have the experience you are having. We don’t know why red has a different quality from blue.