*SEE BELOW FOR PAST LAB MEMBERS.

The current members of my research group are (May 2023):

 

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS

Arthur Powanwe: brain rhythm bursts and Parkinson’s disease

Kamyar Tavakoli:  prediction and separation of signals in multi-delay neural nets

GRADUATE STUDENTS

Ben Barlow (PhD physics - co-sup Joos): effect of NaV channel segregation and mild traumatic injury on action potential generation 

Nicolas Brodeur (PhD physics - co-sup Seely): entropy production in exercise, disease and across the life span  

Raphael Lafond-Mercier (PhD physics): adaptation dynamics and sequence memory 

Alexandre René (Ph.D. physics - co-sup. Jakob Macke, U. Tuebingen): mesoscale dynamical model inference in neural systems with latent variables

Ahmed Hany Mohamed Hassan Rezk (MSc Physics): machine learning approaches to understanding the functional consequences of demyelination

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Thomas Delev (summer 2017), Olivia Ellis (2018), Colin Porter (2020), Alison Riddoch (2021)

RESEARCH ASSOCIATES

Nicolas Bent (Sept. 2015 - August 2016)

                   

Collaborations with (systems neuroscience) Profs. Len Maler, John Lewis, Jean-Claude Béïque, Katalin Toth and (clinical neuroscience) Georg Northoff (psychiatry), Andrew Seely (thoracic surgery), Adam Sachs (neurosurgery), Glen Kenny (kinesiology)  
 

At the University of Ottawa, I have close collaborations with experimental neuroscientists Len Maler, Jean-Claude Béique and Katalin Toth (Cellular Molecular Medicine), John Lewis (Biology), as well as clinicians Andrew Seely and Adam Sachs (The Ottawa Hospital) and Georg Northoff (Royal Ottawa Hospital) and kinesiologist Glen Kenny (uOttawa). We co-supervise graduate students and postdocs, and have regular joint group meetings.

The neuroscience questions motivate much of our work in nonlinear dynamics (including chaos theory), stochastic dynamics (part of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics), and nonlinear time series analysis. For example, we develop theories to understand and predict the activity of the multiple neural feedback loops that form the brain, and the role they play in attention, memory, novelty detection, prediction, generalization etc.... We also look at the dysregulation of neural activity in various diseases such as multiple sclerosis and neuropathic pain. Machine learning approaches, e.g. to infer circuitry and dynamics from microscopic spike train or imaging data, provide a useful toolbox for part of this research.

The close interaction between experiment and theory that these collaborations enable are the hallmark of the Center for Neural Dynamics founded in 2004, which I co-direct and in which there are a total of seven theorists (Naud, Thivierge, Joos, Lefebvre, Perkins, Leblanc and Longtin) and others with computational modeling expertise (Bui and Lewis). This makes for a vibrant research and training environment unique in Canada.

The nervous system of weakly electric fish studied in the Maler and Lewis groups, as well as the mouse hippocampus, brainstem and prefrontal cortex areas in the Béique and Toth labs, are ideal preparations to investigate the physical principles of biological information processing. We study questions about neural coding (the elusive language of the brain ! ), active sensing, physics at the limit of sensory detection, the role of feedback and its modulation in sensory information processing, memory formation and machine interfacing with brain activity. Neurophotonic, including optogenetic, as well as electrophysiological and imaging approaches are combined to understand brain mechanisms from synaptic plasticity to molecular psychiatry.

Modeling work in my collaboration with Northoff addresses the spatiotemporal dynamics of brain resting state activity, stimulus-evoked response and rhythms measured through different modalities (fMRI, EEG,...), and their alteration in psychiatric illness. My collaboration with Andrew Seely, a thoracic surgeon with a physics background, revolves around the application of tools from statistical mechanics, nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory to single and multiple organ dysfunction, tumor energetics and physiological entropy production. Collaboration with Adam Sachs revolves around novel recordings from human  basal ganglia acquired during DBS surgery and modeling pathological brain rhythms. 

I also have a number of national and international collaborations in systems, computational and theoretical neuroscience, nonlinear dynamics and neural machine learning/AI. For example we devise methods to “fit” useful mesoscale models of neural activity from recordings of large numbers of neurons. These models can then teach us what went wrong in pathologies (like epilepsy or Parkinson’s) and how to possibly rectify it. Please consult the papers on my webpage to get an idea about these projects.

PAST LAB MEMBERS (from distant past to recent past)

Graduate Students (many co-supervised with Maler):

Boualem Mensour (PhD physics) (staff researcher, Radiology, Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal)

Daniel Racicot (MSc physics) (staff researcher, Telesat Canada, Ottawa)

Martin St-Hilaire (MSc physics) (industrial physicist, Ottawa)

Steve Guillouzic (PhD physics) (data modeling, Dept. of Defense, Ottawa)

Brian Redmond (MSc physics) (science instructor, Grand Prairie Regional College, Alberta)

David Babineau (MSc physics) (industrial biophysicist, Ottawa)

Maurice Chacron (MSc transfer PhD physics) (now faculty, Physiology, cross-appt. to Physics, McGill)

Brent Doiron (MSc transfer PhD physics) (now faculty, Mathematics, U. Pittsburgh)

Jason Middleton (PhD physics) (now faculty, Louisiana State U Health Sciences Centre, Neurosciences, New Orleans)

Connie Sutherland (MSc physics) (industrial scientist, Ottawa)

Jakub Cieniak (MSc physics) (industrial scientist, Ottawa)

Brian Heffernan (MSc Systems Science)  (PhD candidate, Auditory science, U. Ottawa)

Jason Boulet (MSc physics) (PhD candidate, electrical engineering, McMaster U)

Jérémie Lefebvre (MSc transfer PhD physics) (assistant professor, Biology+Physics, U. Ottawa)

Kieran Bol (MSc physics) (now in financial mathematics)

Dave Houtman (MSc physics) (now teacher at Algonquin College)

Andrea Bravi (PhD Neuroscience)  (now data analyst at Apple UK)

James J. Jun (MSc transfer PhD physics)  (Facebook Reality Labs, California)

Charles Garfinkle (MSc. physics) (now PhD candidate UC Berkeley)

Alexandre Iolov (PhD mathematics) (stochastic financial modeling, Copenhagen)

Alexandre Payeur (PhD physics) (now postdoc jointly in the groups of Béïque and Longtin)

Mathieu Lachance (MSc physics) (CEGEP professor at Collège de l'Outaouais)

Alexandre René (MSc physics) (now PhD student in my group in collaboration with Jakob Macke in Bonn)

Alexandre Mélanson (PhD physics 2019) (now limited term professor, U. Moncton Physics)

Stephen Clarke (PhD Neuroscience 2017, co-sup. Maler) (now postdoc at Stanford)

Arthur Powanwe (PhD physics 2020) (now postdoc with Jérémie Lefebvre and me)

Postdoctoral Fellows (many co-supervised with Maler):

Carlo Laing (now faculty, Mathematics, Massey University, New Zealand)

Benjamin Lindner (now faculty, Physics, Humboldt University Berlin)

Jan Benda (now faculty, Biology, University of Tübingen)

Maurice Chacron (now faculty, Physiology (cross-appt to physics), McGill University)

Jason Middleton (now faculty, LSU Health Sciences Centre, New Orleans)

Krisztina Szalisznyo (KFKI of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

Axel Hutt (Directeur de Recherche, INRIA, Nancy)

Na Yu (now faculty, Mathematics department, Ryerson University)

Reza Khanbabaie (now faculty, Physics, Babol University, Iran)

Gary Marsat (now faculty, Biology, U. West Virginia)

Will Nesse (now lecturer at U. Utah Mathematics)

Jorge Mejias (assistant prof. at U. Amsterdam)

Sara Nicola Jung (now postdoc at U. Bielefeld)

Richard Naud (associate professor, Faculty of Medicine, U. Ottawa)

Gregory Dumont (now Chef d’Équipe, NeuroRestore : EPFL-CHUV, Lausanne)

Belen SanCristobal (now faculty, ELISAVA/U. Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)

Wilhelm Braun (now postdoc with Claus Hildetag, U. Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf)

Alexandre Payeur (now postdoc at MILA, U. Montreal)

Mauricio Girardi-Schappo (now assistant professor of Physics, Departamento de Física - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – Florianópolis, Brazil)

Research Associates:

Jinli Xie (China Scholarship Council exchange)

Nicolas Rodwell Bent

Julie Goulet (short-term postdoctoral visit; now postdoc at U. Bonn)

Greg Barrie (DRDC Ottawa)

Marc Colette

Daniel Brabant (Photonics Research Center, U. Quebec en Outaouais and Optiwave Systems)

Diego Bueti (physics teacher)

Katarzyna Bzymek