Bruno HerbelinSince 10/09 - Scientist Laboratory of cognitive neuroscience Brain & Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. 06/12 - 10/19 Deputy Director Center for Neuroprosthetics École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. 11/05 - 09/09 Assistant Professor Aalborg University Esbjerg Institute of Technology & Copenhagen Institute of Technology, Denmark. 07/01 - 09/05 Research assistant PhD student Virtual Reality Laboratory School of Computer and Communications, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
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.
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.
Marwan Muhammad Ahmed AbdellahMarwan Abdellah, a self-motivated engineer born in Cairo, Egypt in 1987. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Biomedical Engieering with distinction with honor from the Systems & Biomedical Engineering Department (SBME), Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University in 2009 and 2012 respectively. After graduation, he worked as a Research Engineer at IBE Technologies's R&D Department in a 4D ultrasound machines project. Then he moved to work as an Associate Software Engineer at the Biomedical Department in Symbyo Technologies. Afterwards, he joined the Multimedia Laboratory in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) to conduct a research on H.264 & Reconfigurable Video Coding. Currently, he is working as a Scentific Visualization Engineer in the Blue Brain Project led by Prof. Henery Markram in the Brain Mind Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Along with his professional career, Abdellah worked as an instructor at NILES (National Institute of Laser Enhanced Science) in Cairo University. He taught two courses in the areas of Computer Graphics and High Performance Computing. He focused in his M.Sc. thesis research on implementing high performance volume rendering techniques for large scale medical data on heterogeneous platforms. He succeeded in constructing a high performance Fourier Volume Render running entirely on CUDA-enable GPUs. Among his research intersets are High Perfromance Computing, Heterogenous Comuting, Visualization, Scalable Rendering, Computer Graphics & Modelling, Medical Image Processing, Video Processing & Reconfigurable Video Coding, Abdellah has been awarded a graphics card from NVIDIA during attending a workshop in High Performance Computing at the Intenational Center of Theoritical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. His graduation project was honored by ITIDA and Egyptian Ministres of Telecommunications & Higher Education during a celebration organized by ITIDA in March 2010.
Julian Charles ShillcockJulian received his PhD at Simon Fraser University in Canada for work on Monte Carlo simulations of liquid crystal phase transitions and the elastic properties of fluid and polymerized membranes. He was a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany for five years applying coarse-grained simulation techniques - principally Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) and Brownian Dynamics - to equilibrium and dynamic properties of fluid lipid membranes. A major target of this research was to reveal the molecular rearrangements that occur during vesicle fusion. During this time, he developed a commercially-available, parallel DPD code that is being used by several universities. He was an Associate Professor at MEMPHYS in the Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark. He has also worked in industry, designing and writing software for communication satellite simulations (British Aerospace, 1986-1990), and fluid simulation software (Accelrys, Inc., 1998-1999). He joined the Blue Brain Project in 2011, and uses mesoscale simulation techniques, together with theoretical analysis and collaborations with experimentalists, to study the dynamics of cellular processes. Current projects include simulating the formation of the post-synaptic density in dendritic spines and developing theoretical models of the supramolecular organisation of synapses. He also teaches Master's and PhD courses in computational cell biology and biophysics. He wrote and maintains an open source dissipative particle dynamics simulation code: https://github.com/Osprey-DPD/osprey-dpd Orcid: orcid.org/0000-0002-7885-735X 