Hertie AI PhD Student Kyra Kadhim had the opportunity to take part in one of the Janelia Research Campus workhops of 2025.
Janelia Research Campus is a scientific research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that opened in October 2006.[1]
The campus is located in Loudoun County, Virginia, near the town of Ashburn. It is known for its scientific research and modern architecture.Most HHMI-funded research supports investigators working at their home institutions.[5] However, some interdisciplinary problems are difficult to address in existing research settings, and Janelia was built as a separate institution to address such problems in neurobiology.[6] They specifically address the identification of general principles governing information processing by neuronal circuits, and the development of imaging technologies and computational methods for image analysis.
In 2017, it announced a new research area, mechanistic cognitive neuroscience.[7] Janelia conferences and workshops are small, highly specialized meetings that foster conversation, collaboration and inspiration within a vibrant research environment.
Kyra was part of a small selected group of participants of the “Analysis and Modeling of Connectomes” conference in the first week of June 2025 and presented her current research topic.
"Janelia is a beautiful research campus surrounded by green forests and ponds that occasionally hosts small conferences for scientists to present their latest results. I was fortunate to attend their conference on the "analysis and modeling of connectomes" which covered how connectomes give rise to function in neural systems, how they compare across species, and how they can be used to improve simulations of neural systems. I presented a poster on my recent work modeling the contrast invariant encoding of visual information in the mouse outer retina."
