Brains are marvels of biological engineering. With 86 billion neurons and trillions of connections, human brains are the most complex structures in the known universe. But where does this structure come from? How does a mass of brain tissue develop into a coordinated, specialized organ capable of perception, cognition, and action?
This question—how the brain acquires its structure—is one of the oldest in science, reflected in the nativist-empiricist debate spanning philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and biology. Nativists argue that brain structure and core mental skills are innate, encoded in the genome. Empiricists argue that mental skills are products of experience, learned as infants interact with the world. How do we solve this debate and characterize how brains get their structure? Our lab tackles this question by viewing brain development through the lens of protein folding.

The Protein Folding Revolution
Proteins—chains of amino acids that fold into precise shapes—are life’s nano-bricks, assembling and powering almost every structure and process in the body. Like brains, proteins are highly structured, and their structure determines their function. For many years, scientists struggled to understand how proteins acquire their three-dimensional structure from a one-dimensional string of amino acids. This mystery—known as the protein folding problem—persisted for decades.
What finally cracked it? The realization that protein structure is not hardcoded by genes. Instead, proteins fold into shapes that minimize free energy1. The amino acid sequence defines an energy landscape, and the protein finds a stable structure by descending into a local energy minimum. Folding is not deterministic; it’s emergent, shaped by both intrinsic properties (the sequence) and extrinsic conditions (the environment). This was a paradigm shift: the protein folding problem, long thought intractable, became solvable by treating protein folding as an energy-minimization process.
To quantify progress, molecular chemists launched the CASP challenge (Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction), a biennial competition to test whether models could predict protein structures based on sequence2. For decades, progress was slow—until 2020, when DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 solved the challenge with breathtaking accuracy3, winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Folding Brains, Not Just Proteins
What if brains fold like proteins? We study whether brain development, like protein folding, can be understood as a complex structure emerging through energy minimization (Fig. 1). Brains are not sculpted directly by genes, nor entirely by experience, but by an interaction between the two: brains fold to reduce free energy in structured environments. We propose that brains are space-time fitters that adapt to the spatiotemporal data distributions in prenatal and postnatal environments4. Space-time fitting reduces prediction error, minimizing energy needs of the brain.
To test whether space-time fitters develop core mental skills, our lab created a closed-loop system that combines controlled rearing, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality (Fig. 2):

1. Controlled rearing: We raise newborn animals in controlled environments to isolate the specific experiences that shape development.
2. Artificial Intelligence: We use generic (blank slate) neural networks as models of brain development. The models have no innate knowledge; they learn (fold) by minimizing prediction error over time, akin to reducing free energy.
3. Virtual Reality: We embody the brain models in virtual animals and rear those virtual animals in the same environments as newborn animals. This allows for one-to-one comparisons across developing brains and developing models.

This approach—parallel controlled rearing of animals and models—lets us study brain development as computational folding: a self-organizing process where brains develop structure by minimizing free energy. We test whether complex brain structure and core mental skills emerge from energy minimization, without innate primitives to guide development.

What Have We Found?
Do energy-minimizing models fold into the same structure as newborn brains? Our studies suggest that they do. To study object perception, we reared space-time fitting models in digital twins that mimicked the environments from controlled-rearing studies of newborn chicks5-7. The models developed the same object recognition skills as chicks, simply by minimizing prediction error (free energy) over time. The models learned object constancy—not because they were programmed to do so, but because object perception is a statistical consequence of space-time fitters adapting to a newborn’s visual experiences.
Energy-minimizing models also develop social behavior8,9. We embodied space-time fitters in virtual animals and raised those animals in digital twins of the social environments faced by real animals. Despite lacking innate social knowledge, the models developed rich social behavior, mimicking the collective behavior seen in nature (e.g., shoaling fish, flocking birds, swarming insects). The models also developed social preferences8 (learning to prefer in-group over out-group members) and imprinting behavior9. When energy-minimizing models develop in social environments, they fold into social brains, without an innate social-specific code.
For example, consider a newborn fish raised alongside other fish. Initially, the fish moves aimlessly, bumping into others or drifting away. But over time, the fish learns that predicting the motion of neighbors—by swimming in synchrony or staying close—reduces surprise. Coordinated movement minimizes prediction error and thus free energy, leading the fish to favor shoaling behaviors. These social tendencies are not built in; they emerge as the brain folds to fit the sensorimotor statistics of its social world. In this way, complex social behavior emerges from the same free-energy minimization principle that governs protein folding.
Other core mental skills (e.g., numerical cognition, navigation, motor knowledge, language) also develop in energy-minimizing models10. Brain structure develops when space-time fitters fold to minimize free energy in prenatal and postnatal environments. This finding suggests that a unifying principle—energy minimization—governs biological organization across all scales, from nanometer-sized proteins to meter-sized brains.

From Molecules to Minds
Just as AlphaFold2 cracked protein folding, we believe that developmental science is on the cusp of its own computational revolution. By treating brain development as a problem of folding under constraints—solved by minimizing free energy—we can follow in the footsteps of protein folding and build unified, predictive, and mechanistic models of brain development.
Looking forward, a CASP-like challenge could provide the same catalytic effect for developmental science that CASP did for protein folding. CASP unified the field around shared benchmarks, open data, and a competitive testing framework—dramatically accelerating progress11. A similar brain-folding challenge would allow developmental science to measure whether computational models, raised in the same environments as animals, replicate the developmental outcomes of brains. This challenge would quantify progress and show which models best capture how brains develop over time, driving the field towards a solution for the origins of knowledge.

Figure 1. We propose that proteins and brains develop structure in common ways, by minimizing free energy. Complex brain structure and core mental skills develop spontaneously as brains minimize energy in prenatal and postnatal environments.

Figure 2. Closed-loop system for reverse engineering the origins of knowledge, via controlled rearing studies of animals and models. Modified from ref.¹²

References:

1. Anfinsen, C. B. (1972). The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1972. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Nobelprize.org.
2. Moult, J., Pedersen, J. T., Judson, R.,. & Fidelis, K. (1995). A large-scale experiment to assess protein structure prediction methods”. Proteins. 23 (3): ii–v. doi:10.1002/prot.340230303
3. Jumper, J., Evans, R., Pritzel, A. et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature 596, 583–589 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2
4. Wood, J.N., Pandey, L., & Wood, S. M. W. (2024). Digital twin studies for reverse engineering the origins of visual intelligence. Annual Review of Vision Science, 10, 145–70. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-vision-101322-103628
5. Pandey, L., Wood, S.M.W. & Wood, J.N. (2023). Are vision transformers more data hungry than newborn visual systems? 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02843
6. Pandey, L., Lee, D., Wood, S.M.W. & Wood, J.N. (2024). Parallel development of object recognition in newborn chicks and deep neural networks. PloS Computational Biology, 20(12): e1012600. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012600
7. Wood, J.N. (2013). Newborn chickens generate invariant object representations at the onset of visual object experience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(34), 14000-14005.
8. McGraw, J., Lee, D., & Wood, J.N. (2024). Parallel development of social behavior in biological and artificial fish. Nature Communications, 15, 10613. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-52307-4
9. Lee, D., Wood, S.M.W., & Wood, J.N. (2023). Imprinting in autonomous artificial agents using deep reinforcement learning. 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Intrinsically Motivated Open-Ended Learning Workshop. https://openreview.net/forum?id=YYndPojV26
10. Wood, J. N. (in press). Mini-evolutions as the origins of knowledge. Handbook of Perceptual Development. Oxford University Press.
11. Demis Hassabis – Nobel Prize lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025.
12. Garimella, M., Pak, D., Wood, J.N., & Wood, S.M.W. (2024). A newborn embodied Turing test for comparing object segmentation across animals and machines. 12^th International Conference on Learning Representations.

About the Author

By Vanessa LoBue (@vanessalobue) & Kiley Hamlin (@jkileyhamlin)

The Founding Generation Summer Fellowship for Undergraduates aims to develop the next generation of scholars to advance innovative research on infancy and translation of research for the public good. The program pairs promising students with researchers from around the world who conduct cutting-edge science. Identified mentors work with students over an intensive 8-week period to build critical skills through hands-on training in research methods. In September, the third cohort of fellows presented their work at a dedicated virtual symposium.

April Chen, a student at Cornell University, along with mentor by Jillian Lauer from the University of Cambridge, explored how gender stereotypes affect the way parents talk to their infants. Specifically, they examined the forms of praise parents from Edinburgh give to their 9-month-old infants. They found that parents equally praise their female and male infants for their good looks and good behavior, but they provided three times more praise for intelligence to infant sons than infant daughters. This remarkable finding suggests how early societal stereotypes about gender and intelligence begin to take hold.

Leah Gano, a student at the University of Oregon, along with mentor Eric Walle from the University of California at Merced, examined parent-child conversations about discrete emotions, and specifically whether the type of emotion coaching strategy parents use to describe emotions differs based on different emotion categories presented in a book. They found that parents of 4-year-old children provided the most strategies for shame, fear, and guilt. They also demonstrated different strategies based on the specific emotion being discussed, such as seeking emotional support for sadness, and coping with the stimulus itself for fear. These important results will help to inform theories of how children learn about the emotions they are experiencing, and how they develop effective strategies to regulate them.

Marta Pretto, a student at University of Padua in Italy, along with Chiara Cantiani at Scientific Institute IRCCS Medea, studied the association between infants’ temperament and language outcomes between 20 to 48 months of age. They found that children who scored higher in effortful control and lower in motor activation on a temperament battery (ECBQ) also scored better on language scales when compared to children who were lower in effortful control and higher in motor activation. This fascinating work adds to the growing body of knowledge about determinants of individual differences in language development in the first few years of life.

Azzurra Sartini-Rideout, a student at the University of Iowa, along with mentor Ashley Groh from the University of Missouri, studied the developmental origins of brain responding to emotional events. Specifically, they looked at frontal alpha EEG asymmetry in 6- and 12-month-old infants and parent sensitivity during happy, sad, and fearful events. They found that higher level of parenting sensitivity was associated with greater left hemisphere activation (indicating approach motivation) in the infants during the emotional tasks. This suggests that more parent sensitivity can provide infants with a positive approach orientation toward novel events, and provides important further evidence for the key role of parental sensitivity in various aspects of positive infant development.

Syakira Wijaya, a student at Berea College, along with mentor Catherine Sandhofer from University of California Los Angeles, studied noun generalization via an overhearing paradigm with 2-year-old children. They discovered a positive correlation between children’s attention to target objects and correct responses, but further analysis did not conclusively establish attention as a predictor of task performance. These findings are generally in line with those demonstrating the importance of attention on language learning, and nicely highlight some of the challenges associated with developmental work.

In sum, each talk presented beautiful and important results, and each student did an absolutely outstanding job answering questions from senior members of the field of infant studies. As noted by ICIS president Rachel Barr during the question and comment period and echoed by many, it truly felt like a set of talks from graduate students, not undergrads. The students themselves expressed how meaningful and informative their experiences as Founding Generation Summer Fellowship winners have been, and noted that they plan to submit their work to the upcoming ICIS meeting in Glasgow in July, 2024. The future of developmental science is bright!

About the Author

by Nancy E. Hill, Rashmita Mistry and Gigi Luk

The 41st meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) will be taking place in Salt Lake City, Utah from March 23-25! SRCD is an international, multidisciplinary, scientific association that seeks to advance the developmental sciences and promote the use of developmental research to improve human lives.

As co-Chairs of the #SRCD23 Biennial, we— – Rashmita Mistry and Gigi Luk— – in collaboration with SRCD President, Nancy Hill, have been planning an intellectually stimulating and engaging meeting that highlights cutting-edge developmental science that is equitable, just, and inclusive of multiple perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. We are especially excited to welcome you to our first in-person Biennial Meeting since 2019! We have missed the palpable energy of presenters sharing new findings; the hum and buzz of conversations happening all around you; bumping into colleagues in the hallway; the late-night catch-ups, and meeting new friends and collaborators.

In this post, we share a few tips to help navigate the conference and bring your attention to key events and programming. We hope the information included here will be helpful whether this is your first Biennial or, if like us, you consider yourself an “old-timer” for whom attending the Biennial is a long-standing tradition that started when we were graduate students,

What to expect in the #SRCD23 Biennial?

General information:

Check out the Biennial website at: https://www.srcd.org/event/srcd-2023-biennial-meeting/

As excited as we are to welcome you to an in-person meeting, we are mindful that a gathering of this size, with people joining from all around the world, carries with it an elevated risk of spreading the COVID-19 virus. To be safe, please check for regular updates about the COVID-19 Safety Protocol for the meeting at: https://www.srcd.org/event/srcd-2023-biennial-meeting/covid-19-safety-protocol

The online program is available for you to create your personal schedule. In early March, an app will be available to download that will sync with the event in this online program.

https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/srcd/srcd23/

Program Highlights

• To welcome you all and kick off the Biennial on March 23, Thursday, there will be an opening breakfast reception (starting at 7:15 am) preceding Nancy Hill’s Presidential Address (starting at 8:15 am).
• Come hear updates from and engage in dialogue with SRCD’s Task Force on Publications and Ethical Behavior at the Townhall on Thursday from 1:30-3:00 pm.
• The Member Meeting and Awards Ceremony on Thursday evening (starting at 7:15 pm), followed by a Welcome Reception (8:00 pm), is a great event to congratulate award winners and catch up with colleagues.
• Buy your tickets and come celebrate the The Sankofa Soiree: A 50-Year Anniversary Event hosted by the Black Caucus on Friday evening (7:00-9:30 pm).
• Attend the Presidential Salon – moderated by President Nancy Hill and President-Elect Vonnie McLoyd – on Paradigms for a Diverse Developmental Science on Saturday at 10:00-11:30 am.
• Attend a Professional Development Workshop or two to expand and update your methodological, funding, and translational toolkits.

Invited Program

SRCD’s invited program for the 2023 Biennial Meeting highlights research, policy, and practice in child development through 16 sessions— – 7 duo addresses, 4 salons, and 5 symposia across the three days. These invited sessions evolve around the intersecting themes of economic and racial (in)justice, environmental (in)justice, displacement, and Indigenous child development. To promote transdisciplinary research, community groups and youth activists will join selected invited duo addresses and salons.

See the full invited program here: https://www.srcd.org/event/srcd-2023-biennial-meeting/invited-program

Submitted program

The submitted program includes more than 3500 flash talks, posters, paper symposia, conversation roundtable, and professional development sessions. In addition, there are 20 presentations from federal agencies. In addition to the invited and submitted programs, the meeting offers exciting content from SRCD’s Student and Early Career Council (SECC), SRCD Caucuses, and Foundations.

To explore the full program, please visit: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/srcd/srcd23/

Are you a first time attendee or graduate student?

Be sure to check out the First-Time Attendees Welcome hosted by the Student & Early Career Council (SECC) on Wednesday March 22nd from 6-7.30pm.

Graduate students, did you register for a Chat with a Leader event, a student tradition at the SRCD Biennial Meetings? This event provides a forum for students to interact with senior scholars who have central roles in the field of child development and the Society. Various sessions are available Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Ceck out one of the Conversation Hours hosted by SECC, including:

• I Can Do That in Graduate School? Engaging in Community-Based Research and Building Partnerships with Youth, Families, and Communities (Thu, March 23, 10:00 to 11:00am)
• Engaging in Research at a Teaching-Heavy Institution (Fri, March 24, 3:30 to 4:30pm)
• Making the Most of the Graduate School Experience Without Compromising Health and Well-Being (Sat, March 25, 10:00 to 11:00am)
• For more events, search the Online Program by Panel Type.

Look out for events organized by SRCD’s 5 Caucuses – the Black Caucus, Latinx Caucus, Asian Caucus, Indigenous Caucus, and the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity/Expression (SOGIE) Caucus. Search Online Program by Panel Type. In addition to hosting a Business Meeting, look for Caucus-specific events and programming, including:

• SRCD Indigenous Caucus Commencement (Thu, March 23, 5:00 to 6:30pm)
• Black Caucus Poster Session and Reception (Thu, March 23, 5:30 to 6:30pm)
• Cafecito (Latinx Caucus) (Fri, March 24, 8:30 to 10:00am)
• Breaking the bamboo ceiling: Asian Leadership and Empowerment (Asian Caucus) (Fri, March 24, 10:15 to 11:45am)
• Securing an Academic Position Following your PhD: Chat with SOGIE Caucus Scholars (SOGIE Caucus) (Fri, March 24, 12:00 to 1:30pm)

Explore and enjoy Salt Lake City!

Salt Lake City (SLC) is a geographically and culturally diverse city bordered by the Great Salt Lake and surrounded by the Oquirrh (pronounced “oaker”) and Wasatch mountain ranges. Host of the 2002 Winter Olympics, it is world-renowned for its powder snow and excellent skiing and snowboarding sites— – all in less than an hour’s drive from downtown. SLC is also a great base from which to explore Utah’s breathtakingly natural beauty with over 20 national parks. For basketball fans, checkout home games for The Utah Jazz. A little trivia: SLC is the former home of the WNBA’s The Utah Starzz, one of the league’s eight original teams.

Utah is also home to more than 60,000 Native Americans who collectively represent 50+ Tribal Nations. This includes the Ute Indian Tribe of Uintah and Ouray Reservation whose ancestral lands lie about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City. The Ouray Reservation is the second-largest reservation in the country, spanning over 4.5 million acres. We hope you will take the opportunity as visitors to learn about the Native Peoples of this land including their traditions, festivals, and lifestyles. Helpful resources include:

Places to visit and ways to respect their culture and lands: https://www.visitutah.com/things-to-do/history-culture/tribal-cultures

Learn from and about a few of the Tribes: https://www.visitutah.com/things-to-do/history-culture/tribal-cultures/utah-native-tribes

Learn about the land you are on (both Utah and where you come from): https://native-land.ca

We look forward to seeing you in SLC!

About the Authors

by Jessica A. Sommerville

Greetings conference goers! Believe it or not, ICIS 2022 is almost here. 

We share your excitement and trepidation in attending what might be your first in-person conferences since the start of the pandemic! If you are like us, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed about attending a big international conference, after a primarily virtual hiatus for the last few years.  In that vein, we’d like to share some tips and tricks for getting the most out of your ICIS 2022!

Protect yourself and others!

As an international organization that celebrates a diversity of perspectives and ideals, ICIS seeks to promote the health and safety of all its members. We strongly encourage you to mask throughout conference spaces and especially at poster sessions where social distancing may not be possible. Please bring a high-quality mask with you so you can wear it throughout the conference.  Also, don’t forget to download the ArriveCan app on your smart phone/mobile device (available through the App store) if you are travelling from outside Canada, and to complete the questionnaire prior to going through Customs. Taking the time to do this in advance will make the arrival process as smooth as possible!

Download the app! Did you know that ICIS has a conference app? That’s right, we do! On the app (PheedLoopGo!), you can view the conference schedule (and assign events to your personal schedule), look up attendees and chat with them via messenger, receive announcements, read presentation abstracts, access the conference floor plan, and much, much more! Every registered attendee will receive a welcome email to PheedLoop with a link to download the app. Alternately, you can install the app by linking on the appropriate link below:

IOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pheedloop-go/id1551987961

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pheedloop.go

Please note that once you download the app you must login with the email address used to register for the conference. If you have not completed a registration, you will not get access.  

Attend a preconference!

If 3 full conference days are just not enough for you, we encourage you to register for one of ICIS 2022’s exciting and innovative pre-conferences. 

All day preconference

Workshop 1: New methods in infant social neuroscience Organizer: Sam Wass Morning pre-conferences  

Workshop 2: Baby FACS: Facial Action Coding System for Infants and Young Children Organizers: Harriet Oster and Marco Dondi

 Workshop 3: How to build an observation lab Organizer: Rheinhold Grassl, Mangold International GmbH

Workshop 4: Tutorial on using head-mounted eye tracking in infant research Organizers: Chen Yu, John Franchak, Irina Castellanos, David Crandall, Justine Hoch, Karen Adolph

Afternoon pre-conference

Featured Workshop: Embodied and Robotic Approaches to Studying Infant Development and Learning Organizers: James Rehg, Byuoung-Tak Zhang, Jonathan Matthis, Chen Yu  

It’s all about cascades!

The theme of ICIS 2022 Developmental Cascades. Throughout the conference you will see presentations that highlight intersections among behaviors, abilities, and processes at multiple levels of analysis (biological, neural, behavioral, environmental, cultural), across different domains (motor, cognitive, language, social, emotional, etc.), and across time (from prenatal development through early childhood).

Our keynote speakers, presidential symposium, and invited speakers have been selected based on their expertise and the knowledge they have generated about these multi-dimensional intersections.  Be sure not to miss our invited program!

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Charles Nelson – Saturday July 9th from 8:30am to 9:30am (The Effects of Early Psychosocial Deprivation on Brain and Behavioural Development; Confederation 2&3)

Dr. Ruth Feldman – Sunday July 10th from 8:30am to 9:30am (A Two-Brain Perspective on Human Sociality; Confederation 2&3) Invited Speakers

Dr. Jana Iverson – Friday July 8th from 11:30am to 1pm (Developmental Variability and Developmental Cascades: Lessons from Infants with an Older Sibling with Autism; GG III)

Dr. Dima Amso – Friday July 8th from 2pm to 3:30pm (Sampling to Learn and Learning to Sample; GG III)

Dr. Frances Champagne- Saturday July 9th from 9:45am to 11am (Prenatal Epigenetics and the Emergence of Developmental Trajectories; GG III)

Dr. Su-hua Wang- Saturday July 9th from 11:45am to 1:15pm (Towards a Cultural Understanding of How Infants Learn; GG III)

Dr. Phillipe Rochat – Saturday July 9th from 2:15 to 3:45pm (The evolution of developmental theories since Piaget; GG III)

Dr. Diane Poulin-Dubois- Sunday July 10th 11:30am to 1pm (A long and rewarding road: Lessons I have learned; GG III)

Presidential Symposium

Featuring Dr. Alejandrina Cristia, Dr. Nuria Sebastian Galles, and Dr. Linda Smith

Friday July 8th from 9:45am to 11:15am (GG III)

By highlighting current research on Developmental Cascades, we aim to spark new ideas, invigorate researchers in their own work, and advance fresh perspectives on the science of infancy. 

Let’s hear it for the presidents!

At ICIS 2022, we are especially lucky to be able to have TWO presidential talks. Past-President Lisa Oakes will speak from 8:30am to 9:30am on Friday July 8th (Understanding developmental cascades and experience: Diversity matters; Confederation 2&3), and President Catherine Tamis-LeMonda will speak from 5pm to 6pm Friday July 8th (The mountain stream of infant development; Confederation 2&3). Please come hear from our awesome and inspiring leaders to learn cutting-edge information about the state of our science. 

Also, don’t miss the presidential reception from 6pm to 7pm on Friday July 8th (GG Ballroom). This is a great chance to catch up with friends and colleagues and talk to our leaders, face to face! 

Outreach is us!

Join us for a fun and friendly outreach event from 4pm to 6pm on Thursday July 7th (GG III). Learn about the exciting, innovative research being conducted by hometown, University of Ottawa researchers, and mingle with parents from the community. Feel free to bring the kids! We will have a loose parts play station to keep them entertained. Keep an eye out for ICIS board members wearing ask-the-expert ribbons; this is your chance to ask any developmental questions you have!

Calling all babies!

If we learned anything from the pandemic it is that: Recruitment.Is.Important! Come learn about some creative ways to recruit participants and connect with the community at our Roundtable Discussion Session on Recruiting Research Participants (Saturday July 9th, 1:15pm – 2:00pm; GG I) featuring Dr. Rebecca Brand, Dr. Tamar Kushnir, Dr. Casey Lew-Williams, and Dr. Jessica Sommerville. 

Especially for students!

We recognize that attending conferences as a student can be intimidating. One thing to keep in mind is that we all have something in common: our love of baby science! 

To help students connect with others with similar interests, ICIS 2022 has a fantastic line up of student and trainee events and activities!

• Breakfast with Leaders: Saturday July 9th from 7:30am to 8:30am (GG I)

This is your opportunity to meet and chat with field wide leaders! Drs. Dima Amso, Ruth Feldman, Lana Karasik, Charles Nelson, Linda Smith, Alex (Alejandrina) Cristia will be in attendance. This event is sold out but you can email ICIS@podiumconferences.com to join a waitlist if you are interested.

• Post-doc Panel: Friday July 8th from 11:30am to 1pm (Ontario)

Come learn about how to obtain a post-doc and ask any burning questions you may have! This panel will feature current post-docs across a range of sub-fields.

• Student Social:  Thursday July 7th from 5pm to 7pm (at Major Hill’s Park, near the Twist sculpture, as this is near the entrance closest to the conference centre)

Come meet other students and trainees at this off-site non-sponsored event. Registration (free) is not required but is appreciated for head count purposes. If you are already registered for the conference, you edit your registration to include the student social here: https://www.confmanager.com/main.cfm?cid=2918&tid=32

• Student Lounge: all conference (Confederation Foyer); for graduate and undergraduate students

Are you looking for a place to simultaneously relax while also connecting with other students? This is the space for you! Filled with games and fun activities that will help break the ice!

Enjoy Ottawa!

Ottawa is a beautiful multi-cultural city, with tons to offer. Try to fit in some time to see the city. We recommend that you:

• Bike, jog or walk along the Rideau canal
• Visit the National Gallery of Canada, home to one of the finest collections of Indigenous and Canadian art collections in the world
• Grab a bite at the Byward Market, the oldest farmer’s market in Canada
• Stop by Blues Fest for some summer tunes
• Take in a play at the Shakespeare festival
• Drive, bus or bike to Gatineau park, a gorgeous 361 square kilometre conservation park

We look forward to seeing you in Ottawa!

About the Author