Project Development Through CompNeuroSociety
Sebastian Ruiz, 01 May 2025
I met with Upi and Andre initially in an effort to develop projects for CompNeuroSociety student members. Andre took the first step of speaking with Morgan, the NeuroTechX student club advisor, who then gave Andre a list of potential projects for us to decide on which to pursue. At first, we had about 7 potential projects, and we collectively picked two that we liked after Andre had given us the rundown of those projects. The two projects that we liked were ‘Brain Age Prediction’ and ‘The Virtual Brain’.
Before that initial meeting, I met virtually with my previous graduate student mentor, Jack (who is now, if not soon, Dr. Burgess), who gave me the advice to get everyone together to settle on a few areas of neuroscience, and to then from there decide on what to model (for context I told him that we wanted projects related to neural computation/cognitive modeling).
Following the initial meeting with Andre and Upi, I met with Dr. Varela, who is our volunteer faculty advisor for CompNeuroSociety. Similarly to Jack, she advised me to get everyone together to settle on a few topics in neuroscience, and to then from there decide what to model. I told her about our interest in The Virtual Brain platform, which she said she has heard about before.
Right now (5/1/25) we are in the process of replicating some tutorials from The Virtual Brain, to get a hold on the basics to see if we want to go the simpler route (for showcasing a project to students) and replicate a previous study that used The Virtual Brain, or to model a completely new disease, the middle ground of slightly extending a previous study that used The Virtual Brain.
I will keep updating the progress of the project developments over the course of the Summer. I am planning on checking in with Upi and Andre this upcoming Monday.
Tags: CompNeuroSociety, projects, updates, Models, Computational-Neuroscience