“I love talking about the molecular structure [I discovered]”, said Ardem Patapoutian, who leads a lab at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, as he was presenting his work to an audience gathered at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF), in Lisbon, last week. “It's very easy for me to talk about it when I have PowerPoint slides, but what if I'm in a restaurant or in a bar and I want to tell someone about how it works? I decided to get a tattoo of the structure and I want to share it with you.”

What drives someone to fear their own thoughts, or an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat the wall of her house, bit by bit? Why do millions of us get stuck in loops of doubt and dread? And what does it mean to have a brain that simply won’t let go?

The Champalimaud Foundation opens the applications to the 5th edition of the Fundamentals of Medicine Postgratuate Course, a unique course designed for life sciences researchers interested in exploring medical terminology, concepts, and issues, with a focus on fostering collaboration between researchers and medical doctors. 

The Hands-on Molecular Tools workshop aims to cover the fundamental principles and standard techniques used in Molecular Biology and will be taught by experts from CF, FCT-UNL and FCUL/cE3c.

This course will incorporate theoretical and practical classes, where the participants will acquire experience on RNA extraction, cDNA synthesis, PCR, restriction enzyme digestion, electrophoresis, plasmid DNA isolation, as well as, bioinformatics analysis and experimental design of a cloning project. 

The symposium, themed Neuro-Cybernetics at Scale, draws inspiration from the recent advances in AI and machine learning, where scaling has unlocked unprecedented performance. We believe neuroscience may be approaching a similar inflection point. By convening researchers in experimental neuroscience, robotics, machine learning, control theory, and theoretical neuroscience, we aim to explore how ideas of scaling and feedback can shape the future of systems neuroscience.