We are supporting the biennial conference on Research in Encoding And Decoding of Neural Ensembles (AREADNE) in Greece. The funding from Gatsby will enable AREADNE to cement its reputation as a fantastic networking opportunity and forum for one-to-one scientific exchange at the theory-experiment interface.

Through the decade-plus of AREADNE Conferences, the organisers have created a high-profile forum that gathers the global scientific leaders who work on neural ensembles and creates a touch-point for a widely disparate and hybrid field. The conference format is carefully planned to foster discussion and interaction between ~120 investigators of different career stages to encourage the establishment of lasting professional relationships. Both group learders and trainees equally value the experience, which is an intensive week of talks, short talks from early career researchers, working lunches and dinners, and evening poster presentations. Critical to its success is the requirement that senior investigarors attend and stay for all of the meeting.

Building on our previous ad hoc support, Gatsby's new longer term and larger commitment from 2022 to a series of meetings will allow the AREADNE co-chairs to be more forward-looking with respect to the scientific content and future direction of the conference. In that light, they will give consideration to expansions such as targeted support for under-represented groups, efforts to broaden the reach of the meeting to areas of the world beyond their traditional participation, inviting speakers from related disciplines to add value to the main focus of the meeting by providing additional perspective, and adding a pre-meeting workshop for students that allows extended contact with selected members of their invited speakers.

The focus of the AREADNE aligns Gatsby’s aim to encourage mutually beneficial collaborative links between theorists and experimentalists around the world.