Fink and Fitzgerald Organize NITMB Long Program
September 1, 2026
Dr. Andrew Fink and Dr. James Fitzgerald, both Assistant Professors in the Neurobiology Department, are co-organizing a long program through the NITMB alongside Dr. Brent Doiron and Dr. Stephanie Palmer of UIC. The NITMB Scientific Focus on Theory and Mathematics in Neuroscience is a six-week long program comprising a junior scientist workshop, a trio of focused conferences, and a collection of collaborative projects. Together, these coordinated events are intended to bring emerging and established investigators into sustained conversation around three branches of mathematics that increasingly shape modern neuroscience: dynamics, geometry, and probability.
Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will work directly with six invited senior investigators whose expertise spans the thematic conferences (Dr. Dmitri Chklovskii, NYU; Dr. Carina Curto, Brown; Dr. Adrienne Fairhall, UW; Dr. David Lipshutz, Rice; Dr. Ashok Litwin-Kumar, Columbia; Dr. Jacob Zavatone-Veth, Harvard Society of Fellows), as well as the core organizing team (Doiron, Fink, Fitzgerald, Palmer). During the opening week (October 5-9), the junior scientists will be in close residence with the organizers and all six visiting PIs in an intensive Junior Scientist Workshop setting. Three subsequent weeks will center on one of the thematic conferences, each featuring two of the visiting PIs with a dedicated team of NITMB co-organizers responsible for shaping the scientific program and supporting the trainees. These conferences will be open to the broader community and will convene a wide range of theoretical and experimental researchers for three days of talks and discussion, with the junior scientists participating fully.
- Dynamics in Neuroscience Conference. The overarching goal of this workshop (October 12-14) is to explore new mathematics related to dynamical systems and neuroscience. Major themes include network dynamics, learning dynamics, and data-driven methods. Organizers: Doiron, Kaufman, Litwin-Kumar, Noorman, Riecke, Zavatone-Veth. A͟p͟p͟l͟y͟ N͟o͟w͟
- Geometry in Neuroscience Conference. The overarching goal of this three-day workshop (October 26-28) is to identify and discuss new mathematics related to geometry and neuroscience. Major themes include representational geometry, neural network loss surfaces, and topological data analysis. Organizers: Curto, Fink, Fitzgerald, Lipshutz, Muscinelli, Nogueira. A͟p͟p͟l͟y͟ N͟o͟w͟
- Probabilistic Inference in Neuroscience. The overarching goal of this three-day workshop (November 2-4) is to identify and discuss new mathematics related to stochastic processes and neuroscience. Major themes include neural coding, neural data science, and NeuroAI. Organizers: Chklovskii, Fairhall, Glaser, Miri, Palmer, Vaikuntanathan. A͟p͟p͟l͟y͟ N͟o͟w͟
Following each conference, the two paired external PIs will remain for two dedicated “digest” days designed exclusively for the trainees. These smaller sessions will emphasize synthesis of conference material, development of concrete research directions, and application of dynamics, geometry, and probability to contemporary problems in neurobiology. The program will culminate in research projects, which the trainees will be able to work on throughout the program and during two dedicated research weeks (October 19-23, November 9-13). Interested students will be encouraged to propose project extensions that could be hosted throughout an additional collaborative residence at the NITMB with their long-program collaborators and/or home-institution mentors.