Optics and the Brain

The BRAIN topical meeting specifically focuses on cutting-edge research and innovative new tools and techniques that seek to increase fundamental knowledge about the brain and nervous system. The USA BRAIN Initiative and the European Human Brain Project have identified the urgent need for new technologies that can probe the working brain across all levels from single neurons to entire behaving organisms. Optics offers a unique toolkit for multiscale imaging the living and intact brain, while new genetic labeling strategies provide optical contrast to neural function and optogenetics permits the control of cellular function with light. By bringing together an international group of leading engineers, optical and medical scientists, biologists, chemists and physicians, the meeting reflects this topic’s highly interdisciplinary area of research. The BRAIN meeting will bring together researchers working in all aspects of optics in the brain and will serve as a forum for discussion of existing and emerging techniques as well as future directions capable of shedding new light on the healthy and diseased brain.