I am honoured to be leading this team, and I am excited by the opportunities it will provide for the Department of Engineering, and for the Computational and Biological Learning Lab in particular.

Professor Máté Lengyel

The newly launched Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE) – involving 20 principal investigators including Professor Lengyel – will integrate cutting-edge neural recording technologies, computational modelling and cross-species experimentation to systematically test formal mathematical theories of how the brain represents and uses information to guide behaviour.

The collaboration, which will officially begin in July 2025, will provide more than $8 million per year across six teams of researchers, enabling scientists to conduct large-scale studies that typically are not feasible under conventional grants.

Professor Lengyel’s project was selected from an initial pool of 245 applicants after a rigorous multi-year selection process. His research stands at the intersection of mathematics and biology, using sophisticated mathematical methods to understand the brain’s complex information processing systems.

A dream come true

“In many ways, SCENE is a dream come true for me,” says Professor Lengyel. “The scientific questions that we will be investigating and the ways in which SCENE’s 20 different labs around the world are going to collaborate are very close to my ideal of neuroscience.”

What kind of internal models drive our interactions with our environment? Are they focused on things we can control and change? Are they focused on the rewarding aspects of the world? Or do our internal models reflect all aspects of the world roughly equally, regardless of whether those aspects are controllable or rewarding?

“These sorts of questions go to the very core of human and animal intelligence – and even have implications for artificial intelligence,” says Professor Lengyel.

“Personally, these questions have also been very close to my heart since the early years of my career. I have also always felt strongly that to make meaningful progress on these difficult questions, we need to build on solid theoretical foundations and then have stringent empirical tests of the mathematical theories we develop.”

He added: “SCENE's close collaboration between world-leading theoretical and experimental groups, with generous funding by the Simons Foundation, will allow us to realise this vision. I am honoured to be leading this team, and I am excited by the opportunities it will provide for the Department of Engineering, and for the Computational and Biological Learning Lab in particular.”

Investigating human and animal cognition

The SCENE project promises to advance our understanding of how the brain works across levels – from neural circuits to behaviour. The teams include scientists dedicated to theory and data science as well as conducting experiments in species ranging from rodents and bats to humans.

Kelsey Martin, Executive Vice President of Autism and Neuroscience at the Simons Foundation, said: “We are excited to enable a collaborative research programme that uses the framework of ecological neuroscience to understand brain function. With an interdisciplinary approach, we hope to discover fundamental principles of cognition applicable across species.”

Alyssa Picchini Schaffer, Vice President and Senior Scientist of the Simons Collaborations in Neuroscience, said: “We received hundreds of intriguing proposals and are truly excited by the many outstanding scientific directions put forward by our community. It was a rigorous evaluation process, and we are confident that SCENE will push the entire field forward by reshaping our understanding of cognition and behaviour.”

Adapted from a Simons Foundation news article and a Churchill College news article.