Werner Van Geit

Werner Van Geit, born in Antwerp, Belgium, is a computational neuroscientist and software specialist who recently became Project Leader of High Performance Neuroscience at the IT'IS Foundation after serving at EPFL's Blue Brain Project from 2011 to 2023. After earning his Master's degree in Informatics from the University of Ghent, where he focused on building a Turing machine in a pulsed neural network computer, he worked as a researcher in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Antwerp studying Cerebellar Purkinje Neurons. Following three and a half years at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, where he contributed to High-Performance Computing infrastructure, he joined the Blue Brain Project. There, he led the development of BluePyOpt, an open-source tool for optimizing neural models, and managed the creation and curation of electrical neuron models and morphologies. His research has been widely cited, with key publications including work on automated neuron model optimization techniques and the reconstruction of neocortical microcircuitry