Aspen summer program

The Aspen Center is a famous place where physicists congregate during the summer.  This summer they will be hosting a program on the physics of behavior (see the invitation letter from the organizers below).  This will combine neuroscience and animal behavior and should be very interesting.  I plan to be attending.  I encourage everyone to apply.

The Aspen Center for Physics will be hosting a 3-week long workshop on Physics of Behavior between May 27 and June 16, 2012, with an application deadline of January 31, 2012. The idea of the workshop stems from the understanding that the role of physics in biology is broad, as physical constraints define the strategies and the biological machinery that living systems use to shape their behavior in the dynamic, noisy, and resource-limited physical world. To date, such holistic, physics-driven picture of behavior has been achieved, arguably, only for bacterial chemotaxis. Can a similar understanding emerge for other, more complex living systems?To begin answering this, we would like to use the Aspen Center workshop to bring together a diverse group of scientists, from field biologists to theoretical physicists, broadly interested in animal behavior. We would like to broaden the horizons of physicists by inviting experts who quantify behavior of a wide range of model organisms, from molecular circuits to mammals. We would like to explore behavior as possibly optimal responses given the physical and the statistical structure of environment. Our topics will include, in particular, navigation and foraging, active sensing, locomotion and rhythmic behavior, and learning, memory, and adaptive behaviors.

As workshop organizers, we encourage you to apply.  We would also like you to encourage other people who are active in this field to apply.  We do need to be clear, however, that we cannot guarantee admission to the workshop.  Admission to the workshop is granted not by the workshop organizers, but by the Admissions Committee of the Center (with some input from the workshop organizers).  The Admissions Committee will endeavor to accommodate as many applicants to the Workshop as possible, but because of the constraints imposed by the rest of the AspenCenter for Physics program, they may not be able to admit everyone who applies.

We encourage you to visit the web site of the workshop here , and of the Center, http://www.aspenphys.org/, for more information and for application instructions. For those of you unfamiliar with the Center, it is located in lively and beautiful Aspen, CO. It’s a great place to work, to enjoy the mountains, and to bring  family. The Center partially subsidizes lodging for admitted participants. The Center requires that theorists commit for a minimum stay of two weeks, and a three week stay is preferred. Shorter durations are possible for experimentalists.

We hope you will choose to apply. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions.

Sincerely,

The Organizers
Ila Fiete, UT Austin
Ilya Nemenman, Emory U
Leslie Osborne, U Chicago
William Ryu, U Toronto
Greg Stephens, Princeton U