Sean Lewis HillSean Hill is co-Director of Blue Brain, a Swiss national brain initiative, where he leads the Neuroinformatics division, based at the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland. He also directs the Laboratory for the Neural Basis of Brain States at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Dr. Hill served as the Executive Director (2011-2013) and Scientific Director (2014-2016) of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Hill has extensive experience in building and simulating large-scale models of brain circuitry and has also supervised and led research efforts exploring the principles underlying the structure and dynamics of neocortical and thalamocortical microcircuitry. He currently serves in management and advisory roles on several large-scale clinical informatics initiatives around the world. After completing his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, Dr. Hill held postdoctoral positions at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, then joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center where he served as the Project Manager for Computational Neuroscience at Blue Brain until his appointment at the EPFL.
Grégoire CourtineGrégoire Courtine was originally trained in Mathematics and Physics, but received his PhD degree in Experimental Medicine from the University of Pavia, Italy, and the INSERM Plasticity and Motricity, in France, in 2003. From 2004-2007, he held a Post-doctoral Fellow position at the Brain Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) under the supervision of Dr. Reggie Edgerton, and was a research associate for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (CDRF). In 2008, he became Assistant Professor at the faculty of Medicine of the University of Zurich where he established his own research laboratory. In 2012, he was nominated Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) where he holds the International paraplegic foundation (IRP) chair in spinal cord repair at the Center for Neuroprosthetics and the Brain Mind Institute. He published several articles proposing radically new approaches for restoring function after spinal cord injury, which were discussed in national and international press extensively. He received numerous honors and awards such as the 2007 UCLA Chancellors award for excellence in post-doctoral research and the 2009 Schellenberg Prize for his innovative research in spinal cord injury awarded by the International Foundation of Research in Paraplegia.
