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On Wednesday, 11 am ET

 

Organized by David Hansel, Ran Darshan

& Carl van Vreeswijk (1962-2022) 

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About Us

About the Seminar

VVTNS  is a weekly digital seminar on Zoom targeting the theoretical neuroscience community. Created as the World Wide Neuroscience Seminar (WWTNS) in November 2020 and renamed in homage to Carl van Vreeswijk in Memoriam (April 20, 2022), its aim is to be a platform to exchange ideas among theoreticians. Speakers have the occasion to talk about theoretical aspects of their work which cannot be discussed in a setting where the majority of the audience consists of experimentalists. The seminars  are 45 min long followed by a discussion and are held on Wednesdays at 11 am ET. The talks are recorded with authorization of the speaker and are available to everybody on our YouTube channel.

 

To participate in the seminar you need to fill out a registration form after which you will

receive an email telling you how to connect.

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Gabriel Ocker

Boston University

​May 13, 2026

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Mean-field dynamics in networks with

clustered connectivity and dendritic nonlinearities

Networks of interconnected neurons display diverse patterns of activity.  Relating these patterns to the structure of the network is a central goal of theoretical neuroscience. Classic neural field and rate models have been powerful tools for this purpose due to their analytical tractability. Here, we show that the recently-developed combinatorial threshold-linear network (CTLN) model is a mean-field theory for excitatory-inhibitory Hawkes networks, with clustered connectivity, in an inhibition-stabilized regime. This mapping allows us to leverage powerful analytical results for CTLN networks to predict diverse macroscopic dynamics of clustered Hawkes networks, including metastability between various macroscopic fixed points, limit cycles, and chaotic attractors.  We will then examine an extension of this approach to models with nonlinear dendritic dynamics, focusing on dendritic calcium spikes.We uncover a marked point process mean-field theory for these n etworks and use this to examine how somatic vs dendritic-targeting connectivity shapes the mean-field equilibrium phase diagram.

Organizers

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David Hansel

I am a theoretical neuroscientist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France and visiting professor at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. I am mainly interested in the recurrent dynamics in the cortex and 

basal ganglia.

Carl van Vreeswijk *

I am a theoretical neuroscientist working at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France. My main interest is the dynamics of recurrent networks of neurons in the sensory system.

*deceased

Ran Darshan

 I am a theoretical neuroscientist working at the Faculty of Medicine, the Sagol School of Neuroscience & the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Israel. I am interested in learning and dynamics of neural networks. My main goal is to achieve a mechanistic understanding of brain functions.

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©2020 by WWTNS

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