Organisers

• Ankur Sinha, UH Biocomputation Group (a DOT sinha2 AT herts DOT ac DOT uk)
• Anca Doloc-Mihu, SST, Georgia Gwinnett College, USA (adolocm AT gmail DOT com).
• Sharmila Venugopal, Neural Dynamics Group, UCLA, USA (vsharmila AT ucla DOT edu).

Pre-workshop questionnaire

The pre-workshop questionnaire is now live at https://forms.gle/V4yqh16HNV8DmwwE9

The questionnaire collects information on career paths, roles and responsibilities, methods and tools that researchers use to get their work done. The questionnaire should not take more than 15 minutes. Please consider taking the questionnaire to share your experiences with the academic community.

From the list of CNS*2019 attendees that volunteer to be on the panel for the workshop, the organisers will choose 6--8 diverse profiles to be able to cover the broadest range of topics.

Post-workshop questionnaire

Please provide feedback on the workshop using this questionnaire: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc9IoNSmUMJPkgJ2ACnPa1AmlYmMjFj0hiW7c6EH6i64CSy6Q/viewform?ts=5d265017

When and where

The workshop is a half-day workshop. More information on workshops at CNS*2019 can be found here.

• Tuesday, 16th July: morning session (0930 - 1310)
• Location: yet to be confirmed

Panellists

• Frances S. Chance: Principal Member of the Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories, USA.
• Cengiz Gunay: Assistant Professor, Information Technology, School of Science and Technology, Georgia Gwinnett College, USA.
• Malin Sandström: Community Engagement Officer, INCF Secretariat, Karolinska Institute, Sweden.
• Anu Aggarwal: Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Grand Valley State University, MI, USA.
• Rodica Curtu: Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Iowa, USA.
• Fernando da Silva Borges: Post-doctoral fellow, Center for Mathematics Computation and Cognition, Federal University of ABC, São Paulo, Brazil.
• Alla Borisyuk: Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Utah, USA.

Workshop summary

The Computational Neuroscience community is a diverse, international, and interdisciplinary community allowing for various successful career paths, each with their own requirements. Students and postdocs in the community are similarly presented with a diverse range of challenges, and excellent mentorship from current leaders in the CNS community is an invaluable resource for the development of future leaders in re- search or industry.

This workshop will provide CNS students and postdocs the opportunity to learn about successful career paths and strategies from a panel of established computational neuroscientists. Participants will hear from a range of professionals, from junior faculty having recently transitioned from postdoc status, researchers working outside of their home countries, to senior faculty who are involved in reviewing journals, grants, and making academic hirings. The panellists will discuss their current roles, their duties, their career paths, and the skills necessary to navigate them. The workshop will focus on providing suggestions, advice, tips, tricks, dos and don'ts on developing these skills with the goal of preparing the attendees for their professional journeys. Postdocs and students are encouraged to ask questions to the speakers and participate in the discussion of topics of universal interest or specific concerns. To further foster communication in the group and address more specific questions, attendees will be invited to go out for lunch together with the organisers and panellists after the workshop. The organisers are in the process of preparing a dossier of information that will be disseminated to the research community after the workshop. This will include information gathered from a questionnaire sent to attendees (and the academic community in general) before the workshop, along with salient points filtered from the discussion and Q&A sessions that will be held at the workshop.