Comparative Neuroscience: Lessons from Biodiversity

The Picower Institute Fall 2026 Symposium "Comparative Neuroscience: Lessons from Biodiversity" Date: Wednesday, November 4, 2026Time: 9:00am-5:00pmLocation: Singleton Auditorium (46-3002, Third Fl of MIT Building 46)Address: 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139Faculty Host: Brady Weissbourd Animal behavior is incredibly diverse, from insect to human societies; from jellyfish jet propulsion to flying bats. This symposium will bring together scientists with distinct perspectives to examine how nervous systems are organized across species and how these organizational principles relate to mechanisms of nervous system evolution. We will explore questions such as: to what extent do diverse nervous systems share common principles, and when they do, why? What can we learn from species differences? - for example, why are some brains more regenerative than others? How does evolution alter the nervous system to generate novel behaviors? - and how do we compare neural networks across species and levels of complexity to ask such questions? With speakers ranging from evolutionary biology to computational neuroscience, we expect this to be an exciting and thought-provoking day of science. Speakers Herwig Baier, Max Planck Institute for Biological IntelligenceAdrienne Fairhall, University of WashingtonOliver Hobert, HHMI, Columbia UniversityDaniel Kronauer, HHMI, The Rockefeller UniversityKanaka Rajan, Harvard UniversityVanessa Ruta, The Rockefeller UniversityAlejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Stowers Institute for Medical ResearchElly Tanaka, IMBA - Institute of Molecular BiotechnologyMichael Yartsev, HHMI, UC Berkeley