Special Seminar with Sven Dorkenwald

• Date: Monday, March 3, 2025
• Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 am
• Location: McGovern Seminar Room (46-3189)

Talk title:
Reconstruction and analysis of synaptic wiring diagrams of the fruit fly brain and mouse cortex

Talk abstract:
Connections between neurons can be mapped by acquiring and analyzing electron microscopic brain images. In recent years, this approach has been scaled to chunks of mammalian brains and entire invertebrate brains. First, I will present our reconstruction of the first neuronal wiring diagram of a whole adult fruit fly brain, containing >50 million chemical synapses between 139,255 neurons, as well as the technological progress leading up to the creation of this resource. I will discuss how the connectome can be used to study synaptic pathways from the brain’s input to output neurons. Second, I will present progress toward cortical connectomes and how a densely reconstructed circuit between pyramidal neurons provides insight into rules governing circuit assembly.

Bio:
Sven Dorkenwald is a Shanahan Research Fellow at the Allen Institute and the University of Washington, and a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google Research. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics in 2014 and a Masters degree in Computer Engineering in 2017 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 in 2023, 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 the first synapse-resolution connectome of an adult Drosophila brain. Sven joined Google Researcher part-time in 2020, where he is developing self-supervised machine-learning approaches for efficient annotation and encoding of cell reconstructions. Sven joined the Allen Institute and the University of Washington in 2023.