October, 2012
Santiago-Valparaíso, Chile
Facultad de Medicina Universidad de Chile
Santiago, Chile
Centro Interdisciplinario de Neurociencia
Valparaíso, Chile

Overview
We are already organizing the second version of this course after the great success of the first one where 27 students from Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Brasil, Uruguay, Perú and Argentina attended. As in the first version our goal is to create a group of lectures and hands on laboratory course that will expose Latin-American students/Faculty to recent advances and modern techniques in neurosciences, using invertebrates as model systems. The course as before will primarily focus on Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans, and the use of these animal models both in basic neuroscience and biomedical research. This time, however we plan to incorporate scientists working in disease models that exemplified the potentialities of the invertebrate model systems in the biomedical research.

The course will include areas ranging from genetic approaches to the study of the nervous system, brain development, cellular and molecular neuroscience, analysis of brain circuits, navigational mechanisms of migrating monarch butterflies and behavior. Instructors will be both faculty members from the host institutions as well as renowned scientists in each field. This will allow students not only to gain first hand experience with approaches in these model systems, but also to interact and network with leaders in the specific areas of research.

We will maintain updated this web site with the news about the organization of the course.

Organizers:

• Jimena Sierralta, Ph.D.,
• Institute of Biomedical Sciences and
• Millenium Biomedical Neuroscience Institute
• Faculty of Medicine
• Universidad de Chile

• John Ewer, Ph.D.,
• Millenium Interdisciplinary Center of Neuroscience
• Universidad de Valparaíso
• www.cnv.cl

• Yuly Fuentes-Medel
• Neurobiology Department
• University of Massachussets Medical School
• Worcester

Contact to: smallbrainsbigideasplus@gmail.com

http://www.sierraltalab.cl/small-brains-big-ideas-biomedical-insights-from-invertebrate