The International Neuroethics Society (INS) Annual Meeting returns in 2026 in an unprecedented distributed format, with simultaneous events held across three continents: San Francisco (Stanford University), Stellenbosch (South Africa), and Lucca (Italy). The Lucca node, hosted at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in the heart of Tuscany, will take place on April 15–17, 2026, and represents a significant opportunity for the European neuroethics community to engage with a global scientific conversation.
⚠️ Registration deadline for in-person attendance in Lucca: Tuesday, March 31, 2026. This date will not be extended. Register here »
A Rich and Thematically Diverse Programme
The Lucca programme combines plenary sessions, parallel research talks, poster sessions, world café discussions, and two special award ceremonies, bringing together over 70 in-person presenters, more than 20 virtual contributors, and around 50 poster presentations. Below is a thematic overview of the main sessions across the three days.
On April 15, the opening session addresses health technologies, patient agency, and collaborative care, followed by parallel research talks and the first instalment of the Open Neurodata & Data Governance World Café (a cross-hub dialogue).
The day closes with a SINe Award ceremony honouring Thomas Metzinger.
April 16 opens with sessions on glocal neuroethics and the ethical challenges of multimodal AI. It continues with several parallel research and includes a panel on death determination in organ donation contexts, and a discussion on the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology. The Open Neurodata & Data Governance World Café experiment continues on this second day of the conference.
A second SINe Award honours Dame Uta Frith and Chris Frith.
April 17 features the ERA-NET NEURON ELSA-EPNA Paper Award talk by Christopher Poppe on BCIs and end-of-life decisions, sessions on BCI regulation, AI and political influence, and the neuroscience of aggression and responsibility. A case study on neurotoxin use in Syria closes the scientific programme. As in previous days, the conference features a series of parallel research talks.
The conference ends with a keynote by Prof. Francis Shen (Harvard Law School): “A Neurolaw Manifesto”.
Full programme and details: neuroethicssociety.org/meeting/neuroethics-2026/lucca-2026
The conference is co-financed by the University of Pisa: PRIN 2020 project “Hot for Genes – The Role of Brain Gene Expression in Identifying Antisocial Developmental Trajectories and Malleable Risk Factors for Preventive Interventions” (Project Code: 2020WSCSLZ, CUP: I57G22000090001)
