SWC (Hybrid) Seminar - Dr Gilles Laurent

SWC (Hybrid) Seminar - Dr Gilles Laurent, MPI

This event will take place on Tuesday 9 December 2025 at 1pm.

The seminar will be held at 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG. This central location provides easy access for attendees.

Abstract

I will discuss recent results from two on-going projects in my lab. The first concerns visual texture computation, as expressed and carried out by camouflaging cephalopods. Our approach combines in vivo electrophysiology and EM connectomics. The second concerns the nature and mechanisms of sleep’s ultradian rhythm, and its relationship with the circadian rhythm. This behavioral and electrophysiological work, carried out in a reptile, reveals a surprising link between the two.

About the speaker: Gilles Laurent

Gilles Laurent grew up in Morocco and France, studied veterinary medicine and neuroethology in Toulouse, France (DVM and PhD, 1978-85); he learned neuroscience as a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, UK (1985-89) where is was a Locke Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He then joined the faculty of the Biology Division at the California Institute of Technology, where he stayed from 1990 to 2011. In 2009, he became a director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, where he now lives. He has had the good luck to be educated by more than 70 brilliant graduate students and postdocs over the past 35 years. Further details at: www.brain.mpg.de/laurent

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