EMBO Workshop on Dendrites in Greece

Last week, our PhD student Kyra Kadhim had the pleasure of attending the EMBO Workshop on Dendrites in Heraklion, Crete, organized by Panayiota Poirazi in Heraklion, Lucy Palmer and Mark Harnett. The workshop brought together a mix of experimental and computational researchers for an interesting cross-disciplinary dialogue. The talks covered broad topics: exciting new datasets, imaging modalities, connections between neuron morphology and energy consumption, how dendritic structure shifts across the lifespan, and the fine-grained mechanics of synaptic plasticity at the dendritic level. On the first day, Kyra presented a poster on her PhD about retina modeling, which now includes dendritic computation.

The future of dendritic research was also discussed, and one prominent theme was how to convince the broader neuroscience community that dendrites matter. Several speakers made the case compellingly that dendrites aren't passive cables but active computational units with real consequences for energy efficiency, adversarial robustness, and likely much more we haven't fully worked out yet. However, translating that conviction to skeptics requires better storytelling, and there was a long discussion about how researchers can frame dendritic computation in ways that resonate beyond the subfield.

Beyond the science, there were dedicated sessions for early-career researchers covering work-life balance and career trajectories both inside and outside academia, the kind of honest conversation that doesn't always make it onto conference programs. The conference was also a great networking opportunity with an organized dinner on the beach and a small reunion for students of the Imbizo summer school in South Africa.