Cortex Club: the birth of a studentrun discussion forum by Samuel Picard
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he Oxford University Cortex Club is a unique forum for discussion and debate, dealing with significant, challenging contemporary issues in neuroscience. Entirely run by a different group of students each year, it now organizes more than twenty events per year, ranging from small intense debates with local neuroscientists to large seminars featuring world-leading researchers—always followed by further discussions over a drink in the pub.
The Cortex Club was established only eight years ago— since then, it has grown into one of Oxford’s leading neuroscience discussion forums. As this year’s copresident, I feel very fortunate that I can build on all the hard work that previous committees have put into establishing the Cortex Club’s reputation. Indeed, over the last year, it’s been a real thrill to see some incredibly influential scientists accept our invitations. How can a simple but ambitious idea, started by a small group of curious DPhil students, grow into something so established and well attended in just a few years’ time? To answer this question, I thought it would be good to get some historical perspective. I therefore decided to have a chat with our co-founder and first president, Abhishek Banerjee, who is now a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Zürich.
“The time was just right for us to go beyond the classical seminar format.” Could you tell us about where the idea for the Cortex Club came from? We started in the spring of 2009. Oxford Neuroscience, the platform that is now coordinating neuroscience research across the university, had not yet taken the shape that it has today. As a result, all neuroscience-related research groups were more scattered, and people would often stick to their own departmental seminars. Some of us, however, would enjoy hanging out after seminars. In doing so, Dennis Kätzel and I—both DPhil students in neighbouring labs—felt that there was an empty space to be filled. Indeed, together with recordings and imaging, many scientists were starting to manipulate circuits using novel methods like optogenetics, and cross-disciplinary collaboration was becoming more and more essential. Now looking back, I think the time was just right for us to go beyond the classical seminar format, and to create a novel platform for discussion and debate. What did your first events look like? The first Cortex Club session ever was held in May 2009. Daffodils were up about 10 cm and the snowdrops were 30 | Oxford University Biochemical Society
in bloom. Jesper Sjöström came over from UCL—he had carried out important work on synaptic coincidence detection. The discussion was moderated by Ole Paulsen, now Chair of Physiology at Cambridge, who was my DPhil supervisor at the time. The audience was relatively small, but nevertheless it was a fantastic session. It felt like the perfect balance between a roundtable discussion and a fully-fledged talk. We decided to continue with this idea and see where it would take us.
“Because the issue was so fundamental to neuroscience, the discussion quickly grew into a very passionate debate” What is the best memory you have of that first year? We had several very interesting sessions, but I have particularly fond memories of a discussion panel, which perfectly captured the spirit of collaboration between Cortex Club members. It was a debate on rate coding versus temporal coding, with students and post-docs from Andy King’s and Andrew Parker’s labs leading the discussion. Because the issue was so fundamental to neuroscience, the discussion quickly grew into a very