Conference Proceedings

Welcome to our UC Irvine Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM) 2022 conference on “Linking Brain function to Cell Types and Circuits” at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences & Engineering. This meeting follows the success of our first in-person 2021 Center conference “Relationship Between Transcriptomics and Connectomics”, jointly sponsored by our Center and the Cajal Club. We decide to host an annual CNCM conference in mid or late August each year; each meeting has a different focus to capture the exciting fast- moving field of neuroscience.

This conference brings together two cutting-edge domains, transcriptomics and connectomics, and challenges participants to begin thinking seriously about how to approach and analyze the relationship between them. By their very nature, transcriptomics and connectomics deal with  complex  networks  of  molecules  and  neurons,  and  as  such  they  are  catalyzing  a  revolution  in  systems neuroscience that may well lead to fundamentally new ways of thinking about the etiology of brain disorders, and about their treatment in terms of novel underlying biological mechanisms. This  conference  is  the  first  event  jointly  sponsored  by  the  Center  for  Neural  Circuit  Mapping  at  UCI (https://cncm.som.uci.edu/) and the Cajal Club (https://cajalclub.org/). The Center for Neural Circuit Mapping is in its infancy.  It was approved  by  the  Dean  in  January,  2020,  and  is  headed  by  Professor  Xiangmin  Xu.  In contrast, the Cajal Club is an old-timer. It was founded in 1947 and in addition to annual events at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, it has sponsored or co-sponsored major symposia, starting in 2001 with one in Madrid, and followed by others  in  Stockholm,  Querétaro,  Copenhagen,  Pavia,  Seattle,  and  Puerto  Varas,  Chile.  The current president of the Cajal Club, Professor Carol Mason (Columbia) sends her greetings and best wishes.The organizers are deeply grateful to the superb group of speakers who agreed to attend the conference. We also thank the staff of the UCI Center for Neural Circuit Mapping and of  the Beckman  Center of  the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering for making the venue so functional and attractive. And finally, we thank the Cajal Club’s Secretary-Treasurer, Charles E. Ribak, for facilitating the meeting. We look forward to a very rewarding two days of brainstorming.