Wulfram Gerstner

Wulfram Gerstner is a German Computational neuroscience|computational neuroscientist. His research focuses on neural spiking patterns, and its connection to learning, spatial representation and navigation. Since 2006 Gerstner has been a Full Professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he also serves as a Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience.
== Career ==
Gerstner studied physics at the University of Tübingen and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1989, he received his Master's degree with a thesis in experimental quantum optics. He then joined the theoretical biophysics group of William Bialek at University of California, Berkeley as a visiting researcher. He received his Doctor of Philosophy|PhD in theoretical physics from the Technical University of Munich in 1993 under supervision from Leo van Hemmen. He did postdoctoral work at Brandeis University and at Technical University of Munich, where he worked in Computational neuroscience|theoretical neuroscience.
In 1996 he was nominated first as Assistant professor|Assistant Professor and in February 2001 he was promoted as an Associate professor|Associate Professor with tenure at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne|EPFL. In August 2006 Gerstner was appointed Professor|Full Professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne|EPFL in both the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the School of Life Sciences.
== Research ==
Gerstner's research is focused on dynamic models of spiking neurons, spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), neuronal coding in single Neuron|neurons and neuron populations. He also investigates models of the hippocampus and their application in the spatial representation for navigation of rat-like autonomous agents.
He is also one of the initiators and developers of The Deep Artificial Composer (DAC), a deep-learning algorithm that can generate melodies by imitating a given style of music.
== Publications (most cited) ==
* Gerstner, W. and Kistler, W.M., 2002. Spiking neuron models: Single neurons, populations, plasticity. Cambridge university press.
* Gerstner, W., Kempter, R., Van Hemmen, J.L. and Wagner, H., 1996. A neuronal learning rule for sub-millisecond temporal coding. Nature, 383(6595), pp.76
* Brette, R. and Gerstner, W., 2005. Adaptive exponential integrate-and-fire model as an effective description of neuronal activity. Journal of neurophysiology, 94(5), pp.3637-3642.
* Millan, J.R., Renkens, F., Mourino, J. and Gerstner, W., 2004. Noninvasive brain-actuated control of a mobile robot by human EEG. IEEE Transactions on biomedical Engineering, 51(6), pp.1026-1033.
* Gerstner, W., Kistler, W.M., Naud, R. and Paninski, L., 2014. Neuronal dynamics: From single neurons to networks and models of cognition. Cambridge University Press.
== Distinctions ==
Gerstner has been an editorial board member of journals such as The Journal of Neuroscience, Network: Computation in Neural Systems, Journal of Computational Neuroscience, and Science (journal)|Science.
He is the recipient of the Valentino Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience 2018 and in 2010 he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council. Gerstner is an elected member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur|Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz.
== References ==
== External links ==
* Web site of Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience
Category:German people
Category:German neuroscientists
Category:German scientists