Upcoming Events

Theme: Understanding the brain with -omics

Talk 1

Ashleigh Willis
University of British Columbia
Talk title: Single cell approaches define forebrain neural stem cell niches and identify microglial ligands that enhance precursor-mediated remyelination

Speaker Bio: Ashleigh is a postdoctoral research fellow at UBC investigating how the brain repairs itself after injury. Her work focuses on forebrain neural stem cells: how they respond to conditions such as multiple sclerosis and stroke, and how signals from their microenvironment guide their activation, fate and regenerative potential. Her work combines single-cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomic techniques with in vitro and in vivo murine models. She is supported by an endMS Fellowship from MS Canada. Alongside the lab, Ashleigh serves as the Creative Director of Panoramics – A Vision, where she designs events, workshops and other content to education and connect the Canadian single-cell and spatial biology community. Outside of science, Ashleigh enjoys anything that allows her to be curious and creative, and spends much of her time ballet dancing, baking, bird watching, and enjoying nature.

Talk 2

Chris Salmon
Princeton University
Talk title: Comparative connectomics of the sexually dimorphic circuitry in the male and female Drosophila ventral nerve cord

Speaker Bio: Chris is a cellular neurobiologist interested in understanding how the organization of brain cells and circuits shapes different ways of knowing across the animal kingdom. He earned his PhD at McGill University, where he studied neural circuit development and the nanoscale interactions of synapses with astrocytes. He recently joined the connectomics groups of Sebastian Seung and Mala Murthy at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, where he is establishing tools for comparing synapse-resolution of whole nervous systems across individuals and species with a goal of understanding how diverse brains are both different and the same.

https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/82271855801
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/82271855801