Mission

As director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience LCN at the EPFL, Wulfram Gerstner conducts research in computational neuroscience with special emphasis on models of spiking neurons, spike-timing dependent plasticity, and reward-based learning in spiking neurons. The questions on learning in spiking neurons are linked to the problem of neuronal coding in single neurons and populations. His teaching concentrates on learning in formal models and biological systems.

Biography

Wulfram 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'.