Pieter Roelf Roelfsema MD, PhD

Pieter R. Roelfsema received his MD degree in 1991. For his PhD work he went to the group of Wolf Singer at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt (Germany) and he received his PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1995. In 2002 he was employed by the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Netherlands in the institute now named Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. In 2007 he was appointed as general director of this institute. In 2005 he became strategic Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and in 2012 also Professor at the AMC in Amsterdam. Pieter Roelfsema received the highly competitive NWO-VICI award (2008) and the ERC-Advanced grant (2013).

He studies visual perception, plasticity and memory in the visual system using multi-electrode recording techniques in experimental animals, behavioral paradigms in humans, and computational neuroscience approaches. He investigates how neurons in different brain areas work together during tasks that require thinking with the visual brain. Even the simplest visual task activates thousands of neurons across a large number of cortical and subcortical brain areas. Roelfsema studies how these networks of neurons work together to solve the task and how networks configure themselves during learning.