Speaker:

István Kovács, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University

Title:

The Brain as a Critical Spatial Network

Abstract:

Recent cellular-level volumetric brain reconstructions have revealed petabytes of information about the astronomical level of anatomic complexity. Determining which structural aspects of the brain to focus on, especially when comparing with computational models and other organisms, remains a major challenge. Recently, we utilized tools from statistical physics to show that cellular brain anatomy satisfies universal scaling laws, establishing the notion of "structural criticality" in the cellular structure of the brain. For example, we obtain estimates for critical exponents in the human, mouse and fruit fly brains and show that they are consistent between organisms, to the extent that data limitations allow. Such universal quantities are robust to many of the microscopic details of the cellular structures of individual brains, providing a key step towards generative computational models, and also clarifying in which sense one animal may be a suitable anatomic model for another. Therefore, our framework provides clear guidance in selecting informative structural properties of cellular brain anatomy. Similarly, in terms of the complex interplay between the spatial and topological aspects of the neural connectome, we showed that brain networks share simple organizing principles across the studied organisms. We used these observations to design scalable generative network models, and demonstrated predictive power beyond the input data, as they capture several additional biological and network characteristics, like synaptic weights and graphlet statistics. Currently, with our experimental collaborators, we are working on incorporating transcriptomics data into our models to also understand the underlying genetic wiring rules of brain organization. As in the brain the hardware is the software, even with all the remaining open questions, our results are expected to have broad implications on brain function and dynamics.

References:

[1] H. S. Ansell and I. A. Kovács (2024) Unveiling universal aspects of the cellular anatomy of the brain, Communications Physics, 7, 184

[2] A. Salova and I. A. Kovács (2024) Combined topological and spatial constraints are required to capture the structure of neural connectomes, Network Neuroscience, 1-41

Speaker Bio:

István Kovács is Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University, a core member of NICO and NITMB, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Engineering Science and Applied Mathematics. He is a recipient of the 2025 NSF CAREER Award, the Karl Rosengren Faculty Mentoring Award in 2021 and 2023, and was selected for the 2021-2022 Faculty Honor Roll at Northwestern University, for powerful and exceptional impact on student experience. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, a visiting researcher in the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and at University of Toronto, as well as at the Department of Network and Data Science of the Central European University. He received a PhD in Physics from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, working at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics. His group develops novel methodologies to predict the emerging structural and functional patterns in problems ranging from systems biology to quantum physics, in close collaboration with experimental groups.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97797870075
Passcode: NICO25

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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