Organizer: Zeeshan Haqqee
Date & Time: May 18, 2026 – Full Day
Location: University campus in Montreal (TBD)
Ticket price: $30 CAD
Brief Description
Academic research has become increasingly specialized, narrowing trainee perspectives toward the small circles equipped to understand their work. Yet major scientific problems are inherently interdisciplinary. At conferences, we tend to remain in familiar bubbles, attending talks by the same groups, networking with people we already know, while connections that could reshape our thinking go unmade.
The Integrate and Fire Satellite Symposium offers a full-day, trainee-centered event designed to foster genuine interdisciplinary connections among early-career neuroscientists before the main CAN 2026 conference. Participants present their work within thematic sessions organized around big, shared questions in neuroscience, with guided extended discussions that focus each session on genuine dialogue. The event includes an algorithmic speed networking session designed around participants’ research abstracts and clustered poster sessions to provide additional structured opportunities for meaningful connections. We aim to provide attendees with an established network of peers going into the main CAN conference, ready to continue their conversations and expand into each other’s circles throughout the week. Lunch and coffee provided.
Speakers
Speakers will be selected through an open call for abstracts distributed across Canadian neuroscience programs. We anticipate 12-16 trainee speakers organized into 3-4 thematic sessions. Session themes will emerge from submitted abstracts using an open source matching algorithm, which clusters participants by research similarity, with our organizing team curating final groupings to highlight interdisciplinary connections across otherwise unrelated research areas. Speaker selection will prioritize students, postdocs, and early career scientists with attention to institutional diversity, gender balance, and representation of underrepresented groups. This process ensures our speaker composition reflects the breadth of Canadian neuroscience rather than predetermined topics or established networks.