Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany

After studying veterinary medicine and neuroethology in Toulouse (France), Gilles Laurent did a postdoc at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he was a Locke Research Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1990, he joined the Biology and Computation & Neural Systems faculty at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA (USA). In 2009, he moved to Frankfurt aM (Germany), as a director at the Max Planck Institute of Brain Research.

His interests lie at the interfaces of cellular, systems and computational neuroscience. His laboratory has worked on a variety of animals (insects, cuttlefish, reptiles, mammals) and systems (motor, visual, olfactory). His research is now focused on sleep, cortex function and evolution, and visual perception.