Henry Markram is a professor of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL), director of the Laboratory of Neural Microcircuitry (LNMC) and the founder and Director of the Blue Brain Project.
After earning his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, with distinction, he was a Fulbright scholar at the National Institutes of Health, and a Minerva Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Medical Research. In 1995, he returned to the Weizmann Institute, becoming an Associate Professor in 2000. In 2002, he became a full professor at EPFL.
Markram’s research has focused on synaptic plasticity and the microcircuitry of the neocortex, in which he has discovered fundamental principles governing synaptic plasticity and the structural and functional organization of neural microcircuitry. Other key discoveries include the concept of Liquid Computing and the Intense World Theory of Autism.
In 2005, he launched the Blue Brain Project to reconstruct and simulate the brain, starting with the rodent neocortical column.
Markram has published well over one hundred papers which have been cited over 25’000 times. Since 2002, he has spearheaded Switzerland’s ambition to become a world leader in high performance computing and to prioritize simulation-based research; these fields are now two of the three national research priorities declared by the Swiss government.
Markram is also the founder of the Brain Mind Institute and the founder of the European Human Brain Project, one of two ten-year one billion Euro Flagship Projects selected in January 2013 by the European Commission. He designed and co-founded the Frontiers open access publishing model to bring efficiency, accountability and transparency to peer-review (frontiersin.org).
Markram has received numerous awards including the Shannon Visionary Award from Bell Labs and the International Hebb Award from the International Neural Network Society.
Henry has five kids and what he likes most is to go hiking with them in the Alps.
Selected publications
Research Team