Henry Markram

Henry Markram, born in 1962 in South Africa's Kalahari desert, is a Professor of Neuroscience at EPFL and director of the Blue Brain Project. After earning his bachelor's degree from the University of Cape Town and Ph.D. in neurobiology from the Weizmann Institute in 1991, he conducted postdoctoral research as a Fulbright Scholar at NIH and as a Minerva Fellow at Max Planck Institute. His groundbreaking research includes discovering calcium transients in dendrites, spike timing-dependent synaptic plasticity, and the redistribution of synaptic efficacy. He founded the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL in 2002 and launched the Blue Brain Project in 2005 to digitally reconstruct and simulate the mouse brain. In 2013, he initiated the Human Brain Project, though he later stepped down from its leadership. His scientific contributions include developing the liquid computing theory and the Intense World Theory of Autism. With over 300 published papers cited more than 40,000 times, he has significantly influenced neuroscience research and Switzerland's position in high-performance computing. In 2015, his team achieved the first digital reconstruction and simulation of neonatal rat somatosensory cortex microcircuitry.