7 februari 2007

Prof. Pieter R. Roelfsema has been appointed director of the Netherlands Institute for Neurosciences, one of the institutes belonging to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Roelfsema (b. 1965) received his medical degree from Groningen University in 1991. He carried out his PhD research which concerned the synchronisation of the activity of the nerve cells in the visual cerebral cortex as a member of Wolf Singer's group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt (Germany). He received his PhD in 1995 from Amsterdam University and then worked as post-graduate researcher for Henk Spekreijse's Visual System Analysis department at the same university. In 2002 Roelfsema was appointed working group leader of the Netherlands Ophthalmic Research Institute, which became part of the Netherlands Institute for Neurosciences in 2005, the same year in which he was appointed to an endowed chair at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is presently researching visual observation, attention processes and learning in human subjects, laboratory animal models and neural networks.