Talk to Living Neurons: A Live AI × Neuroscience Demo with Open Culture

​What happens when an AI agent runs a neuroscience experiment on living neurons?

​CUB | Columbia AI Club is hosting Open Culture for a live demo and hands-on workshop, one stop on their East Coast tour. Open Culture is a neuroscience startup spun out of UC Santa Cruz. Pre-seed led by BoostVC; supported by Anthropic through its Life Science Verification Program.

​They're building an AI-run lab for living neurons. Their Habitat platform feeds, doses and records neural cultures around the clock. Every recording, dose and stimulation streams into one connected record, so AI agents can help design, run and analyze experiments, with a human approving every hardware step.

​What you'll do

• ​See the loop run live: dose → record → analyze → adjust

• ​Get close to the hardware and the live neural data

• ​Explore the data yourself in beginner or expert mode, or try plugging in your own agent

​Agenda

​3:00 PM — Why the brain is AI's next data frontier

​3:30 PM — Live demo: an AI agent runs the experiment

​4:00 PM — Hands-on lab

​4:30 PM — Networking

​Speakers

​Spencer Seiler, PhD, Co-founder & CEO, Open Culture Tjitse van der Molen, PhD, Co-founder & CTO, Open Culture

​Logistics

​IAB 403, Columbia University · Saturday, Nov 7, 2026 · 3:00–5:00 PM (New York time) No neuroscience background needed. Open to Columbia students and faculty only.

​Learn more about Open Culture: https://openculture.ai/