2nd International Brain Stimulation Conference

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2nd International Brain Stimulation Conference

Chairs: Mark S. George and Harold A. Sackeim
Sponsors: Elsevier, and the Journal Brain Stimulation
Invited speaker gender ratio: 0 Women : 10 Men (0%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 34%

*Method of estimation: The conference is aimed at psychiatrists, engineers, cognitive scientists, neurosurgeons, physicists, and everything in between. Nevertheless, for lack of a better source for base rates in the medical profession and in engineering, we searched NIH RePORTER with keywords “brain” AND “stimulation” and counted the ratio of women among the unique researchers in pages 20, 30 and 40 of 66 results pages.

BCBT2016 – Barcelona cognition, brain and technology summer school

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BCBT2016 – Barcelona cognition, brain and technology summer school

Organizers: Paul Verschure, Andreas Engel and Anna Mura
Funded by: EU projects socSMCs
Invited speaker gender ratio: 1 Woman : 17 Men (6%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 24%

*Method of estimation: Previously established base rate of women in neuroscience.

BrainModes 2016

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BrainModes 2016 – Coordinated brain activity: foundations and applications

Organizers: Daniele Marinazzo, Dante Mantini, Marie Vandekerkhove, Wim Vanduffel and  Hannelore Aerts
Invited speaker gender ratio: 6 Women : 12 Men (33%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 19%

*Method of estimation: Since the conference is advertised as “an annual conference in which methods and models to interpret brain activity, and their applications are discussed” we searched NIH RePORTER with keywords “brain activity” AND “interpret” and counting the ratio of women among the unique researchers in pages 2, 4 and 6 of 7 results pages.

Midwest Workshop on Big Neuroscience Data, Tools, Protocols, and Services

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Advanced Computational Neuroscience Network (ACNN) Midwest Workshop on Big Neuroscience Data, Tools, Protocols, and Services

Organizers: Ivo Dinov, Rich Gonzales, George Alter, Franco Pestilli, Olaf Sporns, Andrew Saykin, Dhabaleswar Panda, Khaled Hamidouche, Xiaoyi Lu, Hari Subramoni, Satya Sahoo, Daniel Marcus, and Lei Wang
(this has got to be a record: 13(!) organizers, all(!) of them male)
Funded by: The National Science Foundation, the Midwest Big Data Hub, the Michigan Nutrition Obesity Research Center (MNORC) and others
Invited speaker gender ratio: 0 Woman : 14 Men (0%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 17-20%

*Method of estimation: since the workshop covers a broad array of topics in neuroscience, with an emphasis on computational methods (a “complex/information/dynamical systems” focus and links to mathematics and physics), we used the previously established base rate of women in computational neuroscience.

Memory mechanisms in health and disease

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Memory mechanisms in health and disease

Organizers: Karl-Peter Giese and Satoshi Kida
Funders: Brain Research Bulletin, NeuroImmunology and Inflammation
Invited speaker gender ratio: 2 Women : 15 Men (12%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 42%

*Method of estimation: we searched NIH RePORTER with the terms “memory” AND “mechanism” and counted the proportion of women among unique PIs on pages 20, 30, 40 and 50 of the 68 pages of results.

The Third Annual Symposium on the Undiscovered Claustrum

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The Third Annual Symposium on the Undiscovered Claustrum

Organizers: Brian Mathur, David Reser, Jared Smith
Funders: Crick-Jacobs Center, Scientifica, ChiSquare Bioimaging
Invited speaker gender ratio: 0 Women : 7 Men (0%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 20%

*Method of estimation: Undiscovered indeed.. searching NIH RePORTER with the term “claustrum” returned only 8 funded grants since 1992, 5 unique PIs, out of them 1 woman. Even with a relatively understudied area, we would have been surprised if only men have discovered the claustrum so far, given that all of the statistics on BiasWatchNeuro suggest that there are no subfields without women in neuroscience..
[We welcome a better estimate of the base rate in the field, e.g. from the membership of The Society for Claustrum Research]

BANCOM 2016 – Biomechanics and Neural Control of Movement

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BANCOM 2016 – Biomechanics and Neural Control of Movement 2016

Organizers: Daniel Ferris, Yasin Dhaher, Fran Gavelli, Rachael Seidler, Doug Weber, Paul Zehr
Invited speaker gender ratio: 17 Women : 28 Men (38%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 30%

*Method of estimation: Same as used for Neuromechanics 2016 conference. [Searching NIH RePORTER with the term “neuromechanics” brought 13 results, 12 unique PIs, out of them 2 women (17%). But since the conference included speakers from computational neuroscience, biomechanics, clinical gait analysis, and rehabilitation robotics, we searched with those terms (with an OR relationship) and obtained 34 pages of results. We then counted the percentage of women out of unique PIs on pages 10 and 20.]

NIPS Symposium: Recurrent Neural Networks and Other Machines that Learn Algorithms

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NIPS Symposium: Recurrent Neural Networks and Other Machines that Learn Algorithms

Organizers: Jürgen Schmidhuber, Sepp Hochreiter, Alex Graves and Rupesh Srivastava
Invited speaker gender ratio: 0 Women : 10 Men (0%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 20%

*Method of estimation: we searched NIH RePORTER with keywords “recurrent” AND “neural” AND “network” and counted the ratio of women among the unique researchers in all 95 results.

New technologies to treat neurodisorders: neuroprosthetics

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New technologies to treat neurodisorders: neuroprosthetics

Organizers: Elvira Pirondini, Marco Capogrosso, Silvia Misiti and Giuseppe Zizzo
Invited speaker gender ratio: 1 Woman : 8 Men (11%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 19%

*Method of estimation: Searching NIH RePORTER with keywords “neural” AND “prosthetics” and counting the ratio of women among the unique researchers in pages 2, 4 and 6 of 7 results pages.

Barrel Cortex Function 2016

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Barrel Cortex Function 2016

Organizers: Fritjof Helmchen, Jochen Staiger, Heiko Luhmann, Christiaan De Kock
Funded by: Multiple sponsors
Invited speaker gender ratio: 3 Women : 25 Men (11%)
Estimated* base rate of females in the field: 27% (average of two estimates)

*Method of estimation: Searching NIH RePORTER with keywords “barrel” AND “cortex” and counting the ratio of women among the unique researchers in the 43 active grants gave 28%. A second search on active grants with keywords “somatosensory” AND “cortex” gave 202 results with 176 unique PIs, 26% of them women.