British Neuroscience Association 2023: Festival of Neuroscience

conference link
April 23-26, 2023
Program Committee: Louise Tratt

Plenary speakers gender ratio: 4 Women: 5 Men (44%)
Estimated base rate of women in the field: 43%*
BWN rating: 3, within 1 standard deviation above base rate

*Method of estimation: previously established base rate of women in the neuroscience field

15th Göttingen Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society

conference link
March 22-24, 2023
Program Committee: Dr. Christine Rose, Dr. Mathias Bähr, Dr. Tobias Böckers, Dr. Ansgar Büschges, Dr. Veronica Egger, Dr. Martin Göpfert, Dr. Sonja Grün, Dr. Eckart Gundelfinger, Dr. Ileana Hanganu-Opatz, Dr. Frank Kirchhoff, Dr. Albert Christian Ludolph, Dr. Heidrun Potschka, Dr. Constance Scharff, Sophie Seidenbecher, Dr. Christian Steinhäuser, Dr. Christiane Thiel

Plenary speakers gender ratio: 2 Women: 6 Men (25%)
Estimated base rate of women in the field: 43%*
BWN rating: 1, within 2 standard deviations below base rate

*Method of estimation: previously established base rate of women in the neuroscience field

#BWNFridayPost: Incorporating female mice into neuroscience research

This article is based on this paper, and here is a twitter thread diving deeper into it by one of the authors.

Why we need female mice in neuroscience research” is an article that dives into the findings of this paper (“Mouse spontaneous behavior reflects individual variation rather than estrous state“) and discusses its findings that female mice have spontaneous behavior that is only “negligibly affected” by hormonal cycles, and actually have less variable spontaneous behavior than male mice. It then goes on to discuss how in neuroscience male mice are traditionally used, and since many of our findings about genes, neural circuits, and behavior are based on mouse research, using only male mice can prevent neuroscience from learning about how these aspects may differ in and impact females.

Colloquium on meta structural functionality of brain: a transdisciplinary approach

conference link
April 06-07, 2023
Organisers: Omar Ait-Ader, Romain Caron, Jérôme Coste, François Berry, P.M. Llorca, J-Jacques Lemaire, Ana Raquel Marques, Anna Sontheimer, CélineTeulière, François Vassal

Invited speakers gender ratio: 0 Women: 14 Men (0%)
Estimated base rate of women in the field: 32.5%*
BWN rating: 0, more than two standard deviations below base rate

*Method of estimation: previously established base rate of women in the Neural structure and brain modelling field

#BWNFridayPost: Gender, Racial, and Ethnic and Inequities in Receipt of Multiple National Institutes of Health Research Project Grants

This paper is written by Mytien Nguyen, Sarwat I. Chaudhry, Mayur M. Desai, et al 

This paper describes a cross-sectional study investigating the gender, racial, and ethnic diversity of NIH investigators in the last 30 years. This investigation found that, among PI’s receiving 3 or more research grants in this time period, female and Black PIs were significantly underrepresented. Read more about this here!

Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain: by the Allen Institute and the University of Washington Computational Neuroscience Center

conference link
August 20-September 3, 2023
Organisers: Michael A. Buice, Saskia de Vries, Adrienne Fairhall, Shawn Olsen, and Eric Shea-Brown

Faculty gender ratio: 7 Women: 11 Men (39%)
Estimated base rate of women in the field: 32.5%*
BWN rating: 3, within one standard deviation above base rate

*Method of estimation: previously established base rate of women in the neural structure and brain modelling field