Dr John Butler continues involvement with Neuromatch
Dr John Butler has been an active participant and organiser for Neuromatch
Neuromatch is an online community of computational neuroscientists which is responsible for Neuromatch Academy and Neuromatch Conference. These activities support learning, mentorship, networking, and professional development in computational neuroscience.
Dr John Butler in the School of Mathematical Sciences has a long-standing involvement with Neuromatch and recently a joint paper for which he is an author, "Neuromatch Academy: a 3-week, online summer school in computational neuroscience", appeared in the Journal of Open Source Education. It describes the process of designing the course materials (available here and here) for an online open code-first summer computational neuroscience school. John’s contributions to the summer school included: content creation with Rebecca Brady (a PhD student in the School of Mathematical Sciences) on numerical methods and differential equations for computational neuroscience; reviewing applications for the student admissions committee; appearing as a panellist for online discussions on the role of ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations in neuroscience and hosting a panel about academic careers in Europe.
The 2020 and 2021 Neuromatch summer schools have provided hands-on computational neuroscience and deep learning methods and skills to nearly 5000 students (undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral trainees and researchers) supported by nearly 500 teaching assistants from over 100 countries. Many of the students who attend the Academy would not have had the opportunity to attend an in-person summer school due to financial or travel restrictions, or limited space in these schools. The Academy aims to provide equal access to excellent computational neuroscience training for all students regardless of geography, nationality, socioeconomic status, or other factors.
In December 2021, John also co-organised the Neuromatch 4.0 conference which featured 220 talks and over 2000 attendees. The conference introduced a number of innovations for online conferences, e.g. linking the talks to corresponding pre-prints in bioRxiv and hosting all the talks on YouTube. Significantly, John was an organiser for a special session for children at which three internationally known researchers gave talks suitable for kids about their work on self-motion: how birds balance (Prof Bing Wen Brinton, University of Washington); how we walk (Prof Jennifer Campos, Toronto University); how we balance in space (Prof Elisa Ferre, Birkbeck, University of London).