Meet-the-Experts and Meet-the-Clinician-Expert Sessions
The Meet-the-Experts Series will continue with live one-hour webinars after the conclusion of Neuroscience 2025, between December 2025 and April 2026.
Visit Neuronline to find out more and register.
View other scientific sessions being held this year.
Meet-the-Clinician-Expert: Nobili — Inside the Human Brain: What Intracerebral Recordings Reveal About Sleep Physiology and Epilepsy
Speaker: Lino Nobili, MD, PhD
Institution: IRCCS G. Gaslini Institute/University of Genoa
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme I – Cognition
From early studies in sleep medicine to a serendipitous move to Milan, where he discovered intracerebral EEG, this speaker’s journey has been shaped by curiosity and chance. By exploring the sleeping brain with intracerebral electrodes, he uncovered how sleep can both promote and suppress epileptic activity. This talk reflects on a career that helped reveal the blurred boundaries between wake and sleep and how dissociated brain states challenge traditional neurophysiological views.
Meet-the-Expert: Robinson — Pursuing Impact in Alzheimer's Disease as a Chemist
Speaker: Renã A Robinson, PhD
Institution: Vanderbilt University
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme C – Neural Aging and Degeneration
Trained as an analytical chemist, Dr. Robinson’s technical expertise in mass spectrometry and proteomics has led to some incredible technologies that allow insight into the understanding of aging, sepsis, and Alzheimer’s disease. This presentation will cover her laboratory’s journey toward its current work on disparities and equity in Alzheimer’s disease, biomarker discovery efforts, and the development of robust and high-throughput analytical pipelines for proteomics.
Meet-the-Expert: Di Giovanni — Control of Sensorimotor Function and Repair Across the Lifespan, Dietary, and Environmental Variables
Speaker: Simone Di Giovanni, PhD
Institution: Imperial College London
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme D – Neuroimmunity, Neurovasculature, and Neural Injury
The speaker will discuss the main steps of his career by linking personal experiences to scientific challenges and achievements. The speaker will talk about how environmental factors including diet and physical activity affect metabolism and immunity to control physiology and repair in the sensorimotor system to optimize function. He will discuss the implications of this work in conditions spanning from traumatic, vascular, inflammatory, degenerative, and metabolic damage to the spinal cord and peripheral nerves.
Meet-the-Expert: Schiller — The Computational Power of Dendrites: From Single Neuron to Behavior
Speaker: Jackie Schiller, PhD
Institution: Technion-Israel Institute of Technology
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme B – Neural Excitability, Synapses, and Glia
This session will explore how the brain represents, learns, and stores information through the lens of dendritic computations in cortical pyramidal neurons. The speaker will share a journey from pioneering N- methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA)-spike detection in vitro and direct voltage and calcium recordings from thin dendrites to uncovering cell type-dependent compartmentalized dendritic computations during motor learning in vivo. Attendees will learn about technical advances, neural coding, and career paths in neuroscience.
Meet-the-Expert: Colón-Ramos — Powering the Brain: A Journey Into the Cell Biology of Energy Metabolism
Speaker: Daniel A Colón-Ramos, PhD
Institution: Yale University School of Medicine
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme A – Development
The speaker’s research program aims to elucidate the principles of self-organization of synapses and circuits, and how those principles underpin function. Recently, he has become interested in how energy metabolic pathways are organized in the context of the anatomical connectome and across scales, from the subcellular architecture of glycolytic energy-producing pathways within synapses to glycolytic energy states of circuits in the connectome. This session will describe the research journey that brought this speaker to these topics.
Meet-the-Expert: Stucky — No Pain, No Gain: Advice for Turbulent Times in Neuroscience Research
Speaker: Cheryl L Stucky, PhD
Institution: Medical College of Wisconsin
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme E – Sensory Systems
We are living in turbulent research times in the U.S. The speaker will share her thoughts and advice on navigating these unprecedented, challenging times in neuroscience research based on her last 30 years navigating a healthy family life and career in somatosensory and pain research. This speaker will offer her perspective on seeking and finding funding, work-life balance, finding your passion, pivoting projects, making and recovering from mistakes, staying positive, and the vital importance of communicating scientific work to the lay public today.
Meet-the-Clinician-Expert: Escolar — Rare Diseases, Real Battles: A Physician's Story of Persistence and Purpose
Speaker: Maria L Escolar, MD
Institution: University of Pittsburgh
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme G – Integrative Physiology and Behavior
In this deeply personal and revealing talk, a physician-scientist shares her journey navigating rare disease research — where treatments don’t exist, systems resist change, and evidence-based medicine lags scientific possibilities. Through stories of breakthroughs, bureaucratic inertia, and heartbreak, she challenges the status quo in training doctors, designing research infrastructure, and defining “possible.” This talk is a call to disrupt complacency, think differently about innovation, and prepare the next generation of physicians to lead translational research.
Meet-the-Expert: Fenton — Remapping My Spaces
Speaker: André A Fenton, PhD
Institution: New York University
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme I – Cognition
How do we learn and know? For much of the speaker’s career, it was assumed that neurons respond to external stimuli as if to represent them, but an equally plausible model asserts that neuronal activity is fundamentally internally organized and instead fit to external features. The speaker will report on investigations of cognition through studies of spatially-tuned cells and synaptic plasticity. Like neuronal networks remap their representations of explored spaces, he has learned to reassess and reframe circumstances and concepts while navigating science and his career.
Meet-the-Expert: De La Prida — Navigating the Memory Space: How Embracing Biological Complexity Uncovers the Brain's Hidden Dynamics
Speaker: Liset M De La Prida, PhD
Institution: Instituto Cajal CSIC
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme G – Integrative Physiology and Behavior
Memory shapes who we are, both as individuals and scientists. It emerges from the interplay of diverse neural circuits, giving rise to representations that guide behavior. In this session, the speaker will share a journey from physics to neuroscience, exploring how brain oscillations and diverse neuron types reveal the principles of memory function. From Hodgkin-Huxley models to neural manifolds, the session will reflect on the challenges and rewards of embracing the brain’s complexity.
Meet-the-Expert: Roelfsema — Conscious Vision and Its Restoration in Blindness
Speaker: Pieter R Roelfsema, MD, PhD
Institution: Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme J – Techniques
What does a sensory stimulus have to achieve in the brain to enter into conscious awareness? The speaker was drawn to neuroscience to answer this question and to understand how the brain rewires during learning. His team started to implant increasing numbers of electrodes into the brain and then realized that stimulation through all these electrodes could enable a precise visual brain prosthesis for the blind. They started up a company to enable translation of the technology to humans.
Meet-the-Expert: Hong — Neural Mechanisms of Prosocial Behavior
Speaker: Weizhe Hong, PhD
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme H – Motivation and Emotion
While it is evolutionarily advantageous for individuals to act in ways that promote their own survival and reproductive success, humans and other animals often display empathy and compassion through behaviors that benefit others. The speaker studies various forms of empathic and prosocial behaviors and investigates the neural mechanisms underlying these behaviors. Additionally, this research extends beyond mechanisms within a single brain, aiming to understand how interbrain neural dynamics emerge through social interactions between individuals.
Meet-the-Expert: Basso — Nonhuman Primate Neuroscience: A 20-Year History of Unplanned Advocacy
Speaker: Michele A Basso, PhD
Institution: University of Washington
Location: SDCC Rm 5
Theme: Theme F – Motor Systems
Research involving nonhuman primates remains crucial for translating discoveries from rodent and computer models to humans with neurological and neuropsychiatric illnesses. Women and neuroscientists historically underrepresented in this area of neuroscience are disproportionately targeted by anti-science extremism. The speaker will discuss their 20+ year experience in this field and their efforts supporting education and advocacy addressing the importance of nonhuman primate neuroscience in advancing scientific knowledge and medical discovery.
