Nicolas Brunel received his PhD in physics from the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris, France) in 1993, laying the foundation for a pioneering career. Thirty years later, his research articles have been cited over 18,000 times and he has given over 130 invited talks at international conferences and schools. Now, Brunel receives the Valentin Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience letting him feel “incredibly honored, and frankly a little incredulous,” as he said after the news about the award reached him.

Brunel’s Science

Brunel’s scientific focus is on learning and memory. Using theoretical models of the brain, together with his research group at Duke University (Durham, USA), he is trying to unravel the mechanisms of learning and memory from the single synapse to the network level. One of his breakthrough articles was “Dynamics of sparsely connected networks of excitatory and inhibitory spiking neurons”, published in 2000 in the Journal of Computational Neuroscience. In the article, which has been cited more than 1,800 times, Brunel provides insights into how the brain manages the balance between excitation and inhibition. Brunel here uses mathematical models to precisely describe the dynamics of recurrent neural networks of spiking neurons. In any case, Brunel seems to have a soft spot for theoretical models. Whether he is studying network dynamics or synaptic plasticity, his work is usually based on models he has introduced, which have been instrumental in uncovering the mechanisms of learning and memory formation in the last decades. Currently, Brunel is “[…] working on new methods to infer synaptic plasticity rules from in vivo data, and to use optogenetic experiments to constrain network models.”

The Scientist Brunel

Brunel is a professor of neuroscience, neurobiology, and physics at the Duke School of Medicine (Duke University, Durham, USA). He has supervised dozens of post-docs and students, organized numerous workshops and schools, is reviewing for high-impact journals (when he is not publishing in those himself), and much more, supporting scientific progress and spreading his curiosity about neuroscience. Brunel is not only able to approach complex neuroscience issues with theoretical concepts but also to participate in interdisciplinary collaborations that have led to groundbreaking insights into learning and memory. Based on Brunel’s “highly influential work in the past decades,” (the award committee) he now receives the Valentin Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience 2023.

The Award will be conferred to Nicolas Brunel at the Bernstein Conference on September 27, 2023. Following the award ceremony, Brunel will give the Valentin Braitenberg Lecture, in which he will present highlights of his research.

The Valentin Braitenberg Award

The award is named after Valentin Braitenberg (1926, Bozen, Italy – 2011, Tübingen, Germany), one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen, Germany). Braitenberg’s research area was the fine structure of the brain and its functional principles; his groundbreaking work focused on the cerebral and cerebellar cortex.

With the financial support of the “Autonome Provinz Bozen Südtirol” the Valentin Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience is now biennially conferred by the Bernstein Network within the framework of the Bernstein Conference.