Carl PetersenCarl Petersen studied physics as a bachelor student in Oxford (1989-1992). During his PhD studies under the supervision of Prof. Sir Michael Berridge in Cambridge (1992-1996), he investigated cellular and molecular mechanisms of calcium signalling. In his first postdoctoral period (1996-1998), he joined the laboratory of Prof. Roger Nicoll at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to investigate synaptic transmission and plasticity in the hippocampus. During a second postdoctoral period, in the laboratory of Prof. Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg (1999-2003), he began working on the primary somatosensory barrel cortex, investigating cortical circuits and sensory processing. Carl Petersen joined the Brain Mind Institute of the Faculty of Life Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2003, setting up the Laboratory of Sensory Processing to investigate the functional operation of neuronal circuits in awake mice during quantified behavior. In 2019, Carl Petersen became the Director of the EPFL Brain Mind Institute, with the goal to promote quantitative multidisciplinary research into neural structure, function, dysfunction, computation and therapy through technological advances.
Wulfram GerstnerWulfram Gerstner is Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience LCN at the EPFL. His research in computational neuroscience concentrates on models of spiking neurons and spike-timing dependent plasticity, on the problem of neuronal coding in single neurons and populations, as well as on the link between biologically plausible learning rules and behavioral manifestations of learning. He teaches courses for Physicists, Computer Scientists, Mathematicians, and Life Scientists at the EPFL. After studies of Physics in Tübingen and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Master 1989), Wulfram Gerstner spent a year as a visiting researcher in Berkeley. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the Technical University Munich in 1993 with a thesis on associative memory and dynamics in networks of spiking neurons. After short postdoctoral stays at Brandeis University and the Technical University of Munich, he joined the EPFL in 1996 as assistant professor. Promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in February 2001, he is since August 2006 a full professor with double appointment in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the School of Life Sciences. Wulfram Gerstner has been invited speaker at numerous international conferences and workshops. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Neuroscience, Network: Computation in Neural Systems', Journal of Computational Neuroscience', and `Science'.
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.
