Alain Destexhe

Alain Destexhe serves as Research Director at CNRS and Vice-Director of NeuroPSI, where he leads groundbreaking research at the interface of physics and neuroscience. After completing his Ph.D. in Ilya Prigogine's department studying brain dynamics, he worked at the Salk Institute before establishing a computational neuroscience laboratory at Laval University. Since joining CNRS in 2000, where he received the CNRS Silver Medal in 2008, he has directed the European Institute for Theoretical Neuroscience (EITN) in Paris. His research spans from microscopic single-neuron studies to macroscopic neural networks, focusing on stochastic cortical activity, network oscillations, and local field potentials. As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computational Neuroscience and Director of Theoretical Neuroscience activities in the Human Brain Project, he has significantly influenced the field through his work on neural dynamics, sleep rhythms, and their relationship to pathological conditions like epileptic seizures. His laboratory combines theoretical methods with computer simulations to explore complex behaviors of cortical and thalamic neurons.