Towards building brains using in vitro biology across scales

How does the brain work? One could argue that to understand how something works, one must be able to build it. Indeed, Nature has figured out the blueprint for building a brain, if you will, in a process known as evolution. So now one asks: How does such a brain blueprint emerge? Since this question is rather tricky to answer quantitatively, is there a brain-like in vitro setting to study the emergence of a blueprint outside of a developing embryo where one can genetically, chemically, and mechanically perturb the process as it occurs? Indeed, there is. The setting is known as brain organoids. Brain organoids begin as a clump of cells and eventually develop into a network of firing neurons. I will discuss work on building minimal, multiscale computational models to predict the structure of a brain organoids early on in development with an eye towards designing new brain organoid structures, or architectures, that are optimized to solve a particular class of computational problems.