Dr Butler entertains at FENS Regional Meeting
Last week, Dr. John Butler of the School of Mathematics & Statistics, TU Dublin, attended the Federation for European Neuroscience Societies Regional Meeting (FRM) in Oslo.
Dr Butler is not only a member of the Federation for European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Communications Committee, but also co-hosted "Funny Brains".
The FRM meeting was from the 16-19th of June 2025 with 1000 attendees. There was a range of excellent speakers, including Prof Terry Sejnowski (Salk Institute for Biological Studies), who introduced independent component analysis as a method for signal processing into Neuroscience, and Nobel Laureate Prof Edvard I. Moser (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), whose work on place cells has been seminal in neuroscience. There were 600 poster presentations ranging from Computational Neuroscience to Neurochemistry and Neuropharmacology.
As a member of the FENS committee, John was at the conference to meet with other members of FENS and promote the FENS Forum in Barcelona in 2026, which is the largest European Neuroscience conference. He also had the privilege of attending the Presidential dinner held at the beautiful Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
This was John's second time co-hosting the Funny Brains workshop with Michele Marin (Agenda 17) and Dr Rebecca Ellis (Swansea University). The event spanned two days. On the first day, there was a workshop with around 60 participants. We shared our experiences in comedy science communication and discussed the benefits of using humour to convey scientific concepts. The participants brainstormed their own comedy routines in small groups, with the organizers providing guidance and feedback. On the second day, 10 participants, forming 9 acts, made their comedy neuroscience debuts in front of an audience of over 100 people at the Young Researchers’ Social Event.