Brief Biography
Olaf Sporns received an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Tübingen (Germany) and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Rockefeller University (New York). He then took a position as a Senior Fellow in Theoretical and Experimental Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute, first in New York and later in San Diego. Since 2000, he has held a faculty position at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he is currently a Professor and Associate Chair. Sporns is also on the faculty of the Programs in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience, the School of Informatics, and the Indiana University Biocomplexity Institute. He directs the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (www.indiana.edu/~cortex/CCNL.html). Dr. Sporns’ main research field is theoretical and computational neuroscience, with a strong emphasis on network complexity and neurorobotics. A main research focus is the design of neuronal models that can be interfaced with autonomous robots and can be used to study neurobiological and cognitive functions such as perceptual categorization, sensorimotor development, and the development of neuronal receptive field properties. Another focus is the design of anatomically and physiologically detailed models of neuronal networks to investigate the complex large-scale dynamics of neuronal populations. This work includes the development of quantitative measures for characterizing complexity in neuronal networks as well as methods for analyzing the topological structure of neuronal connectivity patterns. Dr. Sporns is a member of the AAAS, the Society for Neuroscience, the International Society for Adaptive Behavior, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and Sigma Xi. He is an associate editor or member of the editorial board of the journals BioSystems, Adaptive Behavior, the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, and Neuroinformatics.