Each year the Bernstein Network invites the international computational neuroscience community to the annual Bernstein Conference for intensive scientific exchange. It has established itself as one of the most renowned conferences worldwide in this field, attracting students, postdocs and PIs from around the world to meet and discuss new scientific discoveries.

Over the past decades, behavioral measures, brain imaging and neurophysiological recordings, in both humans and non-human primates, have led to major progress in understanding the neuronal and circuit-level properties that support cognitive functions such as visual recognition, spatial navigation and decision making. Human cognition is special, however, in its unique capacity to acquire new concepts and abilities through learning and education, particularly in the domain of language and mathematics. How far are we from understanding the neural mechanisms that allow us to acquire abstract concepts and symbols? Can we understand which cognitive toolkit is present in all brains since infancy, and how it changes with education? Can we separate the mechanisms of conscious and unconscious processing, and their respective contributions to human learning? To what extent does current animal research shed sufficient light on human computations? Are we still missing fundamental ideas, concepts, theories, and empirical tools to bridge between neuroscience and higher-level cognition?

Are you a student or early career researcher interested in gaining a greater understanding of the relationship between the environment and neuroscience? Then join us for the Summer School on environmental and computational neuroscience, organised by the the Horizon Europe Project‘environMENTAL’, Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes at Aix-Marseille University, the German Centre for Mental Health (DZPG), and the Nature Mental Health ‘Earth Brain Health Commission.’ The summer school will take place at Campus Timone, Faculté des Sciences Médicales et Paramédicales d'Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-Marseille University, France from 8. - 9. October 2025.

Social and physical interactions with the environment shape cognition in humans and non-human animals alike. Understanding these processes requires perspectives from multiple disciplines, including systems and computational neuroscience, behavioral biology, and psychology. To encourage interdisciplinary discussions and to bridge methodological and conceptual gaps between fields, the conference provides a platform for discussing neurocognitive mechanisms, psychological processes, and biological and evolutionary perspectives.

The QStr (Qualia Structure) - IIT (Integrated Information Theory) Summer School offers an exciting opportunity for students, post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty scholars from around the world to explore the intersection of qualitative aspects of consciousness (or qualia) and scientific objectivity. This event is scheduled to take place in Venice and Bertinoro, Italy from October 5 to 17, 2025.

The Neuroinformatics Students Scientific Organization is a student organization operating at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw. For more than 5 years, we have been bringing together students and doctoral students interested in neuroscience in the broadest sense, and we try to promote it through numerous projects, workshops and events. The international conference Aspects of Neuroscience is our greatest projects. It consists of four thematic panels – neurobiology, clinical neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience and computational neuroscience. Every year we host people of science from all over the world, eager to share their knowledge, experiences and research. All neuroscience enthusiasts have the opportunity to listen to fascinating lectures, present their work, or simply share passions with others.

This workshop focuses on real-world applications and demonstrations of event-based cameras and neuromorphic sensors, including perception pipelines and data processing, that go beyond those solely tested in simulated environments. The potential of neuromorphic sensors in robotics has motivated a growing body of literature for solutions to robotic problems, but the amount of work that actually demonstrates the advantages of neuromorphic perception over traditional perception in real-world scenarios still needs to be shown. We encourage the participation and discussion of real-world robotic implementations, task-dependent applications, hybrid (neuromorphic and traditional sensors as well as comparisons between such sensors) systems, and online and real-time algorithms shown in real-world conditions. During the workshop we will discuss the current experimental trends, difficulties, and general solutions for achieving real-world neuromorphic perception for robots.

You are cordially invited to attend the 9th BigBrain Workshop, taking place in Berlin, Germany, on October 28 and 29, 2025. This workshop has established itself as the annual meeting place for the BigBrain community to come together and present their latest research, discuss prospects of the BigBrain associated data and tools, and brainstorm on how to leverage high-performance computing and artificial intelligence better to create multimodal, multiresolution tools for the high-resolution BigBrain and related datasets. This year’s workshop also serves as the Closing Symposium of the Helmholtz International BigBrain Analytics and Learning Lab (HIBALL), highlighting the remarkable achievements of this transatlantic collaboration. To mark this special occasion, we will feature an exceptional lineup of distinguished speakers, not only to celebrate HIBALL’s success but also to explore the future of brain science, fostering discussions on innovative methods and applications in the field. Speakers include: Helen Zhou, Alexandra Young, Andreas Horn, Petra Ritter, and Dagmar Kainmüller. The BigBrain Workshop will again be held in conjunction with a Training Day, taking place as a full-day event on October 27, on-site at the conference venue.

The workshop brings together researchers in computational neuroscience, machine learning, and neuromorphic engineering to present their work and discuss how to translate these findings into a better understanding of neural circuits. Topics include artificial and biologically plausible learning algorithms and the dissection of trained spiking circuits toward understanding neural processing. We aim to have a manageable number of talks with ample discussion time.

The International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI) series has established itself as the world’s premier research conference on Brain Informatics, which is an emerging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research field that combines the efforts of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to explore the main problems that lie in the interplay between human brain studies and informatics research. The 18th International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI'25) provides a premier international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields for presentation of original research results, as well as exchange and dissemination of innovative and practical development experiences on brain Informatics research, brain-inspired technologies and brain/mental health applications.

NEUROCOG is an international biannual conference in cognitive neurosciences intending to provide a workshop for recent advances in all domains of cognitive neurosciences. The 2025 conference topic is AI and the human brain. The 2-day conference is organised around six invited talks provided by leaders in their field. As NEUROCOG aims at creating a sense of community among the researchers, each keynote talk will be followed by an extended discussion time to encourage interactions between the speaker and the audience. With the same goal of fostering the interactions and discussions among the attendants, there will be no parallel talk sessions and the number of individual talks, as the number of attendants, will be limited. Two guided poster sessions will finally be organized with several poster prizes awarded on a competitive basis.

Each year, scientists from around the world congregate to discover new ideas, share their research, and experience the best the field has to offer. Attend so you can: present research, network with scientists, attend session and events, and browse the exhibit hall. Join the nearly half a million neuroscientists from around the world who have propelled their careers by presenting an abstract at an SfN annual meeting — the premier global neuroscience event.

The Bernstein Network will have an information booth at this event!

The fields of biological and artificial intelligence are increasingly converging on a shared principle: the geometry and topology of real-world structure play a central role in building efficient, robust, and interpretable representations. In neuroscience, mounting evidence suggests that neural circuits encode task and environmental structure through low-dimensional manifolds, conserved symmetries, and structured transformations. In deep learning, principles such as sparsity, equivariance, and compositionality are guiding the development of more generalizable and interpretable models, including new approaches to foundation model distillation.

The NeurReps workshop brings these threads together, fostering dialogue among machine learning researchers, neuroscientists, and mathematicians to uncover unifying geometric principles of neural representation. Just as geometry and symmetry once unified the models of 20th-century physics, we believe they may now illuminate the computational foundations of intelligence. We aim to bring together researchers from applied mathematics and deep learning with neuroscientists whose work reveals the elegant implementation of mathematical structure in biological neural circuitry.

The EBRAINS Summit brings together leaders in neuroscience, digital innovation, and policy to shape the future of brain research in Europe. Through in-depth talks, hands-on demonstrations, and interactive poster sessions, the event serves as a key meeting point for driving progress in neuroscience – and for discovering how the EBRAINS infrastructure can support your research.

The CIFAR Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School is a unique, three-day event where tomorrow’s neuroscience leaders work closely with world-class researchers studying the neuroscience of consciousness. Hosted by members of CIFAR’s Brain, Mind & Consciousness program, this year’s event is held from December 10-12, 2025 in Montebello, Canada.

LASCON 2026 offers an intensive four-week training program designed for graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and early-career researchers interested in applying computational and mathematical methods to the study of neurons and neural networks. The curriculum spans multiple scales of brain modeling—from biophysically detailed neurons to large-scale networks and theoretical frameworks of brain function and dysfunction—and covers topics such as extracellular field modeling, synaptic and structural plasticity, brain disease and brain state modeling, artificial intelligence, criticality in brain dynamics, consciousness, and brain–machine interfaces.

Imbizo is a Xhosa word meaning “a gathering to share knowledge”. The Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo is exactly that: an opportunity for African and international students to learn about cutting-edge research techniques in computational neuroscience. Applications until July 1, 2025.

COSYNE brings together researchers from systems neuroscience, computational biology, artificial intelligence, and related fields to explore the neural basis of behavior and cognition. It is a unique meeting point for both experimental and theoretical work, known for fostering deep discussions, fresh ideas, and unexpected collaborations. Founded in 2004, COSYNE provides an inclusive forum for the exchange of empirical and theoretical approaches to problems in systems neuroscience. Today, it is recognized as the premier computational and systems neuroscience conference, drawing over 1,000 researchers annually from a wide variety of disciplines. The success of COSYNE and its scientific program depends critically on the free exchange of ideas and recent findings, which involves the international neuroscience community at large. Therefore, we sincerely hope that you will attend.

The international BonnBrain Conference brings together experts from diverse fields to explore how neural circuits control behavior. As an interdisciplinary meeting, BonnBrain highlights groundbreaking research and encourages lively discussions and informal exchanges among scientists at all career stages. The conference features a diverse lineup of speakers and discussion leaders from leading institutions worldwide. In addition to symposia and keynotes, it offers poster sessions, short talks selected from submitted abstracts, a student-organized symposium, and networking opportunities across disciplines. Jointly hosted by the University of Bonn, DZNE, and the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior – caesar, the event aims to strengthen the local neuroscience community while fostering global collaborations.

Understanding how the brain generates perception and behavior remains a major challenge in neuroscience. Neurons communicate through synaptic inputs located on dendrites, complex, highly branched structures that shape sensory processing, memory formation, and behavior. Advances in imaging, electrophysiology, and computational modeling now allow researchers to explore dendritic function across multiple scales, from single-synapse plasticity to dendritic computations driving behavior. This EMBO Workshop brings together leading scientists from molecular, biophysical, anatomical, computational, and functional neuroscience, as well as neuro-inspired AI, to advance our understanding of dendrites in cognition and disease. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, we aim to uncover fundamental principles governing dendritic computations and their broader implications, including how they may be incorporated into new AI architectures for more efficient or brain-like computation. Set on the stunning island of Crete, this EMBO Workshop is designed to encourage scientific exchange beyond traditional presentations, creating an engaging and interactive environment. Dedicated sessions will support young researchers, such as (1) work-life balance, (2) mentorship across career stages, and (3) career paths within and beyond academia. Through open discussions and collaborative experiences, this meeting will inspire new insights into the role of dendrites in brain function and dysfunction, paving the way for important future discoveries in neuroscience.