Our main interest is the early visual system and and how it does what it does. We seek to understand how it is wired up and to find simple mathematical expressions to describe its output. A goal for our research is to predict a neuron's responses to arbitrary, complex visual stimuli.

Our current interests mostly focus on how neurons in visual cortex integrate sensory inputs from the eyes and lateral inputs from the cortex itself. We wish to explain how these two kinds of inputs interact in determining neuronal responses, and how their relative importance may vary due to adaptive mechanisms.

The tools that we employ are mainly recordings and imaging, with some help from psychophysics and EEG recordings. Through multi-electrode recordings and optical imaging of voltage sensitive dyes, we measure the dynamics of population activity in the brain, both ongoing and in response to visual stimulation.

We pair these advanced experimental techniques with computational techniques, which seek to predict the responses of individual neurons based on the activity of the population and on the sensory stimuli.

Our work is funded by the European Research Council, the Medical Research Council, the National Eye Institute, and the UK charity Fight for Sight. In the past we have also been funded by the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience, the James S McDonnell Foundation, the Human Frontiers Science Program, and the Swiss National Foundation.