ICNCE 2026

This tutorial is an introduction to neuroanatomy and neurophysiology for engineers and computer scientists. We will work our way down from the whole brain to individual neurons and synapses, focusing on where things are and how they work. No prior training in biology is required.

Speaker:

Abigail Morrison is the group leader of “Computation in Neural Circuits” at IAS-6, Jülich Research Centre and a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen. She holds a master’s degree in artificial intelligence and received her PhD in computational neuroscience in 2006 from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Between 2006 and 2009 she was a scientific researcher at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako-Shi, Japan; she subsequently held a junior professorship at the University of Freiburg, Germany, as well as a group leadership at the Bernstein Center Freiburg, Germany from 2009 to 2012. In 2012 she moved to the Jülich Research Centre, where, in addition to leading her computational neuroscience group in IAS-6, she was the scientific lead of the Simulation and Data Laboratory Neuroscience at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre until 2023. She was appointed to a professorship at the Ruhr University of Bochum in 2012 until moving to RWTH Aachen in 2020. Her neuroscientific research interests include learning, representation and self-organization in spiking neural networks, with a secondary technical focus on neuromorphic computing and the software ecosystem for high-performance neural network simulation.