TThe course is organized in three blocks. During the first block, the students will use flies, fish, and human participants to learn, through hands-on device fabrication, environment design, and data acquisition, how modern ethological methods like markerless tracking, virtual reality, automation, and optogenetics can be used for quantitative behavioral experiments.

In the second block, students will study data from a broader range of species while learning to apply quantitative analysis methods (e.g. unsupervised and supervised ethograms, manifold inference, deep neural networks, theoretical modeling) to tackle questions about behavior and brain function.

In the third block, students will form small groups and deploy these new skills to design and implement a week-long research project of their choice that consolidates this new knowledge, culminating in presentations of their findings. The extended project will offer an opportunity for the participants to undertake novel state-of-the-art research supervised by international experts in the field.

In addition:

– International speakers will give daily seminars to describe how quantitative tools of behavioural analysis have impacted their work. Several of these speakers will also conduct pedagogical sessions to instruct students in the devices and analyses they have developed. Students will have structured opportunities to interact scientifically and socially with course speakers outside of the lab.

– Students will give daily micro-presentations on their successes and failures implementing the instructed techniques of blocks 1 and 2.

– Students will give presentations, throughout the course, on the research they are pursuing in their home labs.

– At the end of block 3, students will present their independent projects in a culminating research symposium.