You are cordially invited to the next Distinguished Lecture in Computational Science, to be given by Michael F. Huerta of the National Institute of Mental Health. ********** From Soup to Wires--From Genome to Connectome Wednesday, March 10, 4:00 pm Room G-115, Maxwell Dworkin, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge Michael F. Huerta, Associate Director National Institute of Mental Health Abstract To understand the human brain is to understand the essence of humanity. Over the last hundred years, scientists have studied the chemical, genetic, molecular and cellular bases of nervous system function and dysfunction in model organisms and humans. The advent of - omics approaches in the last decade has multiplied data from these levels of biological organization many fold, and the questions scientists can now address are breathtaking in their scope, depth and complexity. The nervous system, however, has levels of organization beyond the cell; these higher levels represent the connectivity that allows communication across cells, circuits and systems. Knowledge about connectivity is crucial to understand brain function in health and disorder, yet this entire class of data is absent for the human brain in any systematic, comprehensive or otherwise modern sense. To fill this critical gap, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, an ongoing consortium comprising 16 institutes and centers of the NIH, has launched the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The HCP will use cutting-edge, noninvasive neuroimaging tools to collect high-quality, well characterized data from hundreds of healthy adults, and will share these data, models, analytic tools and other information with the research community at large. This $30 million effort is expected to transform our understanding of the human brain and will provide a conceptual framework allowing neuroscientists to better appreciate the meaning of, and relationships among, diverse data from all levels of biological organization. The HCP is an example of high-throughput biology approaches to biomedical research. As these approaches become more common, the biomedical research enterprise will change, with computational sciences becoming increasingly important to NIH in pursuit of its mission of improving the health of the nation and all of humanity. About the Speaker Michael Huerta’s research background is in systems neuroscience. He earned baccalaureate (zoology) and doctoral (anatomy) degrees from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, did postdoctoral work at Vanderbilt University, and served on the faculty of the University of Connecticut Health Science Center. He joined the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1991 to create a multiagency initiative that helped develop the field of neuroinformatics, and has continued to lead and participate in many digital biology and informatics activities across NIH, including the NIH Roadmap’s National Centers for Biomedical Computation, the NIH Blueprint’s Neuroscience Information Framework and Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse, the NIH Biomedical Informatics Coordinating Committee, and the Human Connectome Project. Dr. Huerta has also led efforts to change NIH practices to better accommodate paradigms such as team science and interdisciplinary research. Dr. Huerta currently serves as the: Associate Director of NIMH for Scientific Technology Research, Director of the NIMH Office of Cross-Cutting Science, and Director of the NIH’s National Database for Autism Research. _________ Refreshments served at 3:45 pm Mark your calendar for these upcoming talks: Mar. 8, noon: Patrik Jonsson, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (SciGPU Seminar) Mar. 24, 4:00 pm: Pat Hanrahan, CANON USA Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford (Distinguished Lecture in Computational Science) Mar. 31, 4:00 pm: Ben Fry, design and software consultant (IIC Colloquium) For more information about IIC colloquia and other events : http://iic.harvard.edu/events/upcoming_____________________________________… iic-colloquium mailing list iic-colloquium(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.deas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iic-colloquium