Teaching Computation in Neuroscience

William Grisham is an addjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Grisham’s main research interests lie in pedagogy and comparative neuroanatomy. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology from Colorado State University and his PhD in psychology from Bryn Mawr College. He completed his postdoctoral training at UCLA.

Mathew Birdsall Abrams is a deputy director at the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), an organization dedicated to enabling open and FAIR neuroscience. He is also the lead developer of TrainingSpace, an online hub that aims to make neuroscience educational materials more accessible to the global neuroscience community.

Walt Babiec is a lecturer in the undergraduate interdepartmental program for neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate students about topics including synaptic physiology, learning and memory, and the nonlinear dynamics underlying the functioning of physiological systems. He earned his PhD in neurobiology at UCLA and still finds time to perform research looking at the biochemical processes mediating fundamental aspects of synaptic communication and developing dynamical systems models of micro- and macrolevel brain functions. Before studying neuroscience, Babiec was a practicing engineer for nearly a decade at The Boeing Company, where he designed, built, and tested communications satellites.

Adrienne Fairhall, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology at the University of Washington and co-directs the UW Computational Neuroscience Center. She is a computational neuroscientist whose research focuses on developing mathematical models and data analysis to reveal circuit function and computation in a wide range of model species, including insects, jellyfish, birds, and nonhuman primates. She obtained her undergraduate honors degree in theoretical physics from the Australian National University and her master's degree and PhD in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her postdoctoral training in neuroscience took place at NEC Research Labs with Bill Bialek and at Princeton University with Michael Berry.

Pascal Wallisch serves as clinical assistant professor at New York University. He received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago. Wallisch’s main research interests lie at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and data science. He co-founded the "Neural Data Science" summer course at CSHL and wrote several books on the analysis of data for neuroscience purposes.

Robert Kass is a Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Computational Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He previously was a department head of statistics at CMU. Over the past 15 years Kass’s research has focused on applications of statistics to neuroscience. He received his PhD in statistics from the University of Chicago.

Richard Olivo is a professor of biological sciences and neuroscience at Smith College. He was also an associate director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. He received his PhD degree from Harvard. His early research was on invertebrate neurobiology, but in recent years he has focused on innovations in teaching, including by serving as project director for SfN's Educational Resources in Neuroscience (ERIN) and organizing annual teaching workshops.