SfN05

Jim asked me to enter a blog with my thoughts on SfN05. As usual, SfN was a “stock market” of information, as a senior colleague called it, a feast of amazing lectures, posters, demonstrations, symposia, etc. To me, it is the personal meetings that most notably define SfN. Both the formally arranged one, e.g. with collaborators from out of town to discuss the status of the project or exchange data, and the informal ones, i.e. bumping into the right person at the right time, trading bits of information or planting the seed for more extensive exchanges down the road. Many of my own research projects (and I can very concretely think of recent grants and papers) have started just that way at previous SfN meetings. This year the sequence of formal and informal meetings was even more intense than in the past, nearly around the clock!

More generally, I think that the meeting had a lot of energy, movement, and scientific appeal. The presence of neuroinformatics in particular was pervasive – my impression is that databases and analysis tools are changing the face of neuroscience research the way bioinformatics did to molecular biology. The ratio of “secondary” discovery (from re-analysis of archived data, be those gene sequences, fMRI images, or neuronal reconstructions) over “primary” data collection is destined to only increase in the future. I was very pleased that our own results (George Mason, Krasnow Institute, and Computational Neuroanatomy Group) received a considerable level of attention and praise. This was also the first SfN meeting and poster presentation for many of our grad students, a milestone I am particularly proud of!

Giorgio