Felix SchürmannFelix Schürmann is co-director of the Blue Brain Project and involved in several research challenges of the European Human Brain Project. He studied physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, supported by the German National Academic Foundation. Later, as a Fulbright Scholar, he obtained his Master's degree (M.S.) in Physics from the State University of New York, Buffalo, USA, under the supervision of Richard Gonsalves. During these studies, he became curious about the role of different computing substrates and dedicated his master thesis to the simulation of quantum computing. He studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, under the supervision of Karlheinz Meier. For his thesis he co-designed an efficient implementation of a neural network in hardware.
Auke IjspeertAuke Ijspeert is a full professor at the EPFL, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). He carried out postdocs at IDSIA and EPFL, and at the University of Southern California (USC). He then became a research assistant professor at USC, and an external collaborator at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research institute) in Japan. In 2002, he came back to the EPFL as an SNF assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in October 2009 and to full professor in April 2016. His primary affiliation is with the Institute of Bioengineering, and secondary affiliation with the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of sensorimotor coordination in animals, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. (see for instance Ijspeert et al Science 2007, Ijspeert Science 2014, and Nyakatura et al Nature 2019). He is also investigating how to assist people with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. He is regularly invited to give talks on these topics (e.g. TED talk given at TED Global Geneva, Dec 8 2015). With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, SAB2018, and CLAWAR 2019. He is an IEEE Fellow, member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, and associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics and for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. He has acted as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2009-2013) and for Soft Robotics (2018-2021). He was a guest editor for the Proceedings of IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Autonomous Robots, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and Biological Cybernetics. He has been the organizer of 7 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, LATSIS2006, SSRR2016, AMAM2019), and a program committee member of over 50 conferences.
Werner Alfons Hilda Van GeitWerner is the Group Leader of the Cells team within the Simulation Neuroscience Division in Blue Brain.
The goal of his team is to build the single cell models which are the building blocks of the larger network models used in the Blue Brain Project. The first step when building these cell models consists of reconstructing, analysing and artificially recreating neuron morphologies. Next, a biophysically detailed electrical model for the different cell types is built. For the latter the team uses automated parameter optimisation tools like Blue Brain’s open source BluePyOpt tool, but they are also active in extending and developing other Blue Brain software packages related to single cells.
Alexander MathisAlexander studied pure mathematics with a minor in logic and theory of science at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. For his PhD also at LMU, he worked on optimal coding approaches to elucidate the properties of grid cells. As a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Venkatesh N. Murthy at Harvard University and Prof. Matthias Bethge at Tuebingen AI, he decided to study olfactory behaviors such as odor-guided navigation, social behaviors and the cocktail party problem in mice. During this time, he increasingly got interested sensorimotor behaviors beyond olfaction and started working on proprioception, motor adaption, as well as computer vision tools for measuring animal behavior.
In his group, he is interested in elucidating how the brain gives rise to adaptive behavior. One of the major goals is to synthesize large datasets into computationally useful information. For those purposes, he develops algorithms and systems to analyze animal behavior (e.g. DeepLabCut), neural data, as well as creates experimentally testable computational models.
