Pieter Roelfsema

Emerging techniques session | The title of the talk is not defined yet.

Pieter Roelfsema serves as the director of the Dutch Brain Institute (KNAW). He holds professorships in the Vrije Universiteit and the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, while being a group leader at the Institute de la Vision in Paris. In addition, Prof. Roelfsema is the coordinator of the Dutch neurotechnology initiative Neurotech-NL, as well as the co-founder of Phosphoenix, a startup aiming to restore vision in blind individuals by developing a visual prosthesis that directly interfaces with the brain.

His team investigates visual perception, blindness, plasticity, and consciousness across humans, non-human primates, and artificial neural networks. Prof. Roelfsema seeks to understand the mechanisms by which different brain areas coordinate during visual perception and learning. One of his primary goals is to design a visual prosthesis capable of restoring a rudimentary form of sight.

His scientific contributions were honored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) with a NWO-VICI award. He also received the prestigious ERC-Advanced grant on two occasions, and became a Falling Walls Winner in the Life Sciences category in 2023.