At this one day event we are happy to announce an excellent speaker line up, consisting of three external researchers and two local AU researchers:

• Peter Dayan (Director, MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany)
• Zach Mainen (Principal Investigator, Champalimaud Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal)
• Read Montague (Director, Center for Human Neuroscience Research, Virginia Tech, USA)
• Noëmie Mermet-Joret (Associate Professor at Dept. of Clinical Medicine, AU) - click to visit PURE profile
• Dan Bang (Associate Professor at Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, AU) - Click to visit PURE profile

The event is free of charge and catering will be provided throughout the day. Registration is needed.

Below, you can learn a bit more about the external speakers.

Peter Dayan | Talk title: Risking your Tail: Curiosity, Danger & Exploration

Peter Dayan is director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. His work builds and tests computational models of neural processing. Main themes include unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning, covering how animals come to represent the world and to choose appropriate actions in the face of rewards and punishments. He has long worked on role of the brain’s main neuromodulators, including dopamine and serotonin, in these processes. A more recent interest is failure modes of neural processing and the nascent field of computational psychiatry. He collaborates with a wide range of theoretical and experimental groups, including animal and human researchers. He won the Brain Prize in 2017.

Zach Mainen | Talk title: Serotonin: latent states, predictions and surprises 

Zachary Mainen is a Principal Investigator at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon and was among the founding scientists of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme. He studies how the brain makes decisions and learns from experience, with a particular focus on neuromodulators that reshape neural computation across the whole brain. His work has helped define modern experimental and computational approaches to decision-making, especially in relation to uncertainty, confidence, and flexible behaviour. He also co-founded the International Brain Laboratory, an ambitious international effort to achieve a brain-wide understanding of decision-making. In recent years, his research has expanded to include large-scale neural recordings in mice, the neuroscience of psychedelics, and the decoding of human behaviour from naturalistic signals.

Read Montague | Talk title: Dopamine dynamics in healthy human subjects

Read Montague is director of the Center for Human Neuroscience Research at Virginia Tech. In his early work, he developed the reward prediction error theory of dopamine together with Peter Dayan and Terry Sejnowski, an ahead-of-its-time application of algorithms from artificial intelligence to characterise neural function and one of the most influential theories in computational neuroscience. He is a founding figure in the fields of neuroeconomics and computational psychiatry, combining computational models with brain imaging to understand human decision-making and disorders of the mind. In recent years, his group has pioneered a machine learning-based approach to electrochemistry for estimating sub-second neuromodulator dynamics (e.g., dopamine and serotonin) in the conscious human brain.