David Hansel, PhD in Physics, is senior researcher at the CNRS (France) and visiting scientist at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel). Theoretical neuroscientist, he is co-leader of the Cerebral Dynamics Plasticity and Learning laboratory (CNRS, Paris). His expertise includes the collective dynamics of large neuronal networks, the mechanisms underlying feature selectivity in sensory cortices, the collective dynamics in the basal ganglia and the neural correlates of working memory. He uses techniques borrowed from physics and has a long record of collaborations with experimentalists. With C. van Vreeswijk (1962-2022), David Hansel founded the World-Wide Theoretical Neuroscience Seminar (www.wwtns.online), a seminar series held on zoom since 2020.
Selected Papers:
Mahrach, A., Chen, G., Li, N., van Vreeswijk, C. and Hansel, D., 2020. Mechanisms underlying the response of mouse cortical networks to optogenetic manipulation. Elife, 9, p.e49967.
Li, N., Chen, S., Guo, Z.V., Chen, H., Huo, Y., Inagaki, H.K., Chen, G., Davis, C., Hansel, D., Guo, C. and Svoboda, K., 2019. Spatiotemporal constraints on optogenetic inactivation in cortical circuits. Elife, 8, p.e48622.
Darshan, R., Van Vreeswijk, C. and Hansel, D., 2018. Strength of correlations in strongly recurrent neuronal networks. Physical Review X, 8(3), p.031072.
Pattadkal, J.J., Mato, G., van Vreeswijk, C., Priebe, N.J. and Hansel, D., 2018. Emergent orientation selectivity from random networks in mouse visual cortex. Cell reports, 24(8), pp.2042-2050.
Darshan, R., Wood, W.E., Peters, S., Leblois, A. and Hansel, D., 2017. A canonical neural mechanism for behavioral variability. Nature communications, 8(1), p.15415.