Vivek began his career in aerospace engineering and numerical modeling, spending a few years working at MathWorks. Neuroscience courses at Brandeis convinced him to switch fields and get his PhD in Computation & Neural Systems at Caltech, after which he started his own lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. At Janelia, his lab has developed methods to record and perturb the activity of populations of identified neurons in the brains of head-fixed Drosophila while the animal is behaving in a virtual reality environment. Using these and other techniques like EM connectomics, they seek to understand recurrent circuit dynamics underlying navigation. Vivek, who is now a Senior Group Leader, also serves as Head of Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience at Janelia, leading a new, 15-year research effort to understand cognitive behavior and computations at the level of their circuit, cellular and molecular implementation in rodents, fish and flies.

Greg read Natural Sciences at Cambridge before moving to Stanford for his PhD in neuroscience. His thesis research with Liqun Luo introduced the Drosophila olfactory system as a model for studying the development of wiring specificity in the brain. Since 2008 he is an MRC Investigator at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (where the first connectome of C elegans was obtained by White, Brenner and colleagues).

Greg’s group studies the genetic and circuit basis of behaviour focussing on sexually dimorphic circuits, olfaction and the interaction between learned and innate circuits. They are also heavily involved in Drosophila connectomics, including developing computational and experimental tools for analysis and exploitation of connectomes. Greg has a secondary appointment at the University of Cambridge, where he directs the Drosophila Connectomics Group, a collaboration with HHMI Janelia and the University of Oxford.

Dr. Kasthuri is the first Neuroscience Researcher at Argonne National Labs and an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Neurobiology, University of Chicago. He has an MD from Washington University School of Medicine and a D.Phil. from Oxford University where he studied as a Rhodes scholar. As a post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Kasthuri developed an automated approach to large volume serial electron microscopy (‘connectomics’). Currently, the Kasthuri lab continues to innovate new approaches to brain mapping including the use of high-energy x-rays from synchrotron sources for mapping brains in their entirety. The Kasthuri lab is applying these techniques to in service of answering the question: how do brains grow up, age, and degenerate?

Dr. Kim is a project scientist at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) and her primary focus is in applying innovative techniques of correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) adapted to solve biological projects. Her research explores the development of methodologies and techniques to retrieve information from biological specimens using a wide variety of imaging modalities and increasingly retrieving and integrating information across those modalities using advanced imaging techniques such as light microscopy, electron microscopy (EM), x-ray microscopy, and serial block face scanning EM. She has expertise in several areas of neuroscience and is leading various projects studying visual pathway connectome and neurodegenerative diseases using CLEM.

Jörgen is a postdoctoral associate at MIT and has more than 10 years of experience in the area of EM based connectomics. He has worked on all steps of the connectomics pipeline, ranging from sample preparation in the wet lab to machine learning based automatic tracing and synapse detection. Jörgen received a Boehringer Ingelheim Fellowship for his doctoral studies with Prof. Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich where he collected multiple massive EM datasets of songbird brain tissue and developed state-of-the-art automated analysis methods, while co-founding ariadne.ai, one of the leading startups in biomedical image analysis. He collaborates closely with laboratories at New York University, Max Planck and Google Research to push the boundaries of the field and enable cubic centimeter scale connectomes at synaptic resolution.

Dr. Harriet Kung is the Deputy Director for Science Programs in the Office of Science (SC) at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The SC mission is to deliver the scientific discoveries and major scientific tools that transform our understanding of nature and advance the energy, economic, and national security of the United States. SC accomplishes its mission and advances national goals by supporting the frontiers of basic research, the world’s largest suite of major scientific user facilities, and science for energy and the environment.

As Deputy Director for Science Programs, Dr. Kung is the senior career official providing scientific and management direction and oversight for the SC research programs, including Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, High Energy Physics, and Nuclear Physics. Dr. Kung also provides management direction and oversight of the Offices of Science Communications and Public Affairs, Scientific and Technical Information, Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists, and Grants and Contracts Support.

Wei-Chung Allen Lee is an Assistant Professor in the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Wei received his Ph.D. from MIT for his work with Elly Nedivi and was a postdoctoral fellow with Clay Reid at Harvard. Since starting his lab in 2016, his group works to understand how neural computations arise from the structure of the brain. The lab currently focuses on how sensory information is transformed into behavior. His group approaches understanding the logic of neuronal circuits by developing and combining comprehensive, large-scale structural and functional imaging techniques.

Ed Lein is Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Washington. He received a B.S. in biochemistry from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from UC Berkeley, and performed postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2004 and has led the creation of large-scale gene expression atlases of the adult and developing mammalian brain as catalytic community resources, including the inaugural Allen Mouse Brain Atlas and developing and adult human and non-human primate brain atlases. Dr. Lein has driven a number of advances in using the tools of modern molecular genomics to study mammalian brain organization at the regional, cellular and functional level. He leads the Human Cell Types program at the Allen Institute, focused on creating a cellular atlas of the human brain, understanding conserved and specialized features of human brain, developing tools for genetic access to specific cell types in non-genetic organisms including human, and understanding cellular and molecular consequences of Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Lein is a member of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network and the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee.

Jeff Lichtman is Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard. He received an AB from Bowdoin (1973), and an M.D. and Ph.D. from Washington University (1980) where he worked for 30 years before moving to Cambridge in 2004. He is a member of the Center for Brain Science. Lichtman’s research interest revolves around the question of how mammalian brain circuits are physically altered by experiences, especially in early life. He has focused on the dramatic re-wiring of neural connections that takes place in early postnatal development when animals are doing most of their learning. This work has required development of techniques such as “Brainbow” transgenic mice to visualize neural connections and monitor how they are altered over time. Recently his efforts have focused on developing new electron microscopy methods to map the entire wiring diagram of the developing and adult brain. This “connectomics” approach has as one of its aims uncovering the ways information is stored in neural networks.

Albert received his A.B. in Physics from Princeton University in 2015, with a certificate in Biophysics. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate with Dr. Aravinthan Samuel at Harvard University. Albert studies the compact nervous system of the nematode worm C. elegans, pursuing biological and technological approaches which will help bridge single-cell and network scales of inquiry. He developed methods for recording and analyzing whole-brain activity, and used these methods to study chemosensory ensemble responses, build tools for deterministic pan-neuronal landmarking, and compare functional activity to the C. elegans connectome.