Our lab had an extended scientific excursion in Japan this summer!
We first started our journey by going to Fukuoka, in the south of Japan. We participated in the Annual Meeting of the Japanese Neuroscience Society. The meeting took place in the Fukuoka Congress Center, and it included many scientific sessions covering a broad range of neuroscience research.
Our contributions at the meeting first started with a symposium talk by Ziad. The symposium was on active vision across species, and we presented our comparative work on the contributions of visual responses in either the primary visual cortex or superior colliculus to orienting eye movements. Other speeches at the symposium included talks on topics related to marmosets, cats, mice, and humans, and also covering different types of eye movements, from saccades to vestibular ocular reflexes.
Later in the same conference, Tanya gave a great talk on the roles of multisensory integration in different visual pathways from the retina to the oculomotor brainstem.
We then moved to Kyoto, where we visited Kyoto University and the lab of Tadashi Isa and his colleagues. We presented our work on the cortical and subcortical drives for sensory-driven oculomotor phenomena. The visit was also a great opportunity to discuss potential future collaborations with our colleagues in Kyoto, and to get exposure to their facilities and research techniques.
Finally, we visited the University of Tokyo and TMDU (the Tokyo Dental and Medical University). Our host there was Mayu Takahashi, and we planned several exciting new collaborative projects with her. We also presented our work on the visual functions of the superior colliculus and lower brainstem oculomotor nuclei to the Tokyo community.
The trip was very fruitful, and we are energized for starting several interesting new projects with our Japanese colleagues!
