I studied biology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and received the PhD in Behavioral Biology in 1988 with a thesis on the EEG correlates of human information processing and psychopharmacological influences.
I then moved to the neurology clinic of the University Hospital in Zurich where I was research assistant in the lab of Prof. Dietrich Lehmann, developing and applying methods of spatio-temporal EEG and ERP analysis. I interrupted this work for a postdoc fellowship at the Neuromagnetism Laboratory of the Department of Physics and Psychology at the New York University with Prof. Sam J. Williamson, where I combined EEG with MEG, a tool that at that time just started to be useful for brain research.
In 1994 I was appointed at the Medical Faculty of the University of Geneva to build up a functional brain mapping laboratory at the neurology clinic, directed by Prof. T. Landis. I habilitated at this faculty in 1998 and became associate professor in clinical neuroscience in 2003. In 2005 I was appointed director of the EEG Core of the Lemanic Biomedical Imaging Center (CIBM). In 2012 I was appointed Full Professor of Neuroscience at the Medical Faculty of the University of Geneva.
Since 2007 I am Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Brain Topography. I was President of the Swiss Society for Neuroscience from 2013 to 2015, President of the International Society for Brain Electromagnetism from 2012-2014, and council member of the Swiss League against Epilepsy from 2008-2015.
My work has always been devoted to the methodological advancement of the EEG, moving it from the analysis of waveforms to a neuroimaging tool. The application of this imaging method in cognitive as well as in clinical neuroscience is the main purpose. Together with former colleagues of the Lehmann-group we wrote a book entirely devoted to this method called “Electrical Neuroimaging” (Cambridge, 2009).
Laboratory
Research Team