UW Data Science Seminar: Sven Dorkenwald

UW Data Science Seminar: Sven Dorkenwald

When

02/27/2025    
4:30 pm – 5:20 pm

Please join us for a UW Data Science Seminar featuring Shanahan Fellow Sven Dorkenwald on Thursday, February 27th from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. PT.

The seminar will be held in Hitchcock Hall 132 – Campus Map.

“Reconstructing the Synaptic Wiring Diagram of the Fruit Fly Brain”

Abstract: Connections between neurons can be mapped by acquiring and analyzing electron microscopic brain images. In recent years, this approach has been applied to chunks of brains to reconstruct local connectivity maps that are highly informative yet inadequate for understanding brain function more globally. We reconstructed the first neuronal wiring diagram of a whole adult brain, containing >50 million chemical synapses between 139,255 neurons reconstructed from a female Drosophila melanogaster. In this talk, I will discuss the technological progress in machine learning and computer systems that led up to the creation of this resource. Further, I will highlight how the advent of large-scale connectomes is opening up new directions for neuroscience research. The technologies and open ecosystem developed for the fly brain connectome set the stage for future large-scale connectome projects in other species. I will give an outlook on connectomes for large mammalian brains.

Biography: Sven Dorkenwald joined the Allen Institute and the University of Washington as a Shanahan Fellow in September 2023. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics and a Masters degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. While in Heidelberg, he worked on automated image analysis in connectomics with Jörgen Kornfeld in the department of Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. Sven received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Neuroscience from Princeton University, where he worked with Sebastian Seung and Mala Murthy. During his PhD, he developed approaches for the reconstruction and analysis of neuronal circuits from Electron Microscopy images and spearheaded the FlyWire consortium effort that produced a synapse-resolution connectome of an adult Drosophila brain. As a student researcher at Google Researcher, Sven devised a self-supervised machine learning approach for efficient annotation of cell reconstructions. As a Shanahan Fellow, Sven is working on the analysis of new and emerging connectomics datasets while pursuing new ways to integrate them with neuroscience datasets from other domains to enable multi-modal analyses.

The UW Data Science Seminar is an annual lecture series at the University of Washington that hosts scholars working across applied areas of data science, such as the sciences, engineering, humanities and arts along with methodological areas in data science, such as computer science, applied math and statistics. Our presenters come from all domain fields and include occasional external speakers from regional partners, governmental agencies and industry.

The 2024-2025 seminars will be held in person, and are free and open to the public.