Séverine Durand, Ph.D.

Scientist III

Contact Neural Dynamics Electrophysiology

Bio:

In her current role, Séverine manages the Neuropixels operations team involved in data collection for Openscope. Séverine joined the Allen Institute in 2012 as a scientist with Clay Reid exploring visual properties in V1 and dLGN during awakeness and anesthesia with electrophysiology. Séverine joined Shawn Olsen’s team in 2018 to develop and execute Neuropixels pipelines (passive and active behavior). Prior to joining the institute, Séverine received a PhD in Neurosciences from the University of Zurich with Matteo Carandini deciphering center-surround interactions in V1 receptive fields. She went on to postdocs in Tokyo (Riken) and Boston (Harvard University) with Takao Hensch, investigating the development of visual properties in Rett Syndrome model mice.

Research Focus:

I have always been fascinated by how our brain masters the treatment of millions of cues in our everyday environment, and especially the amazing tasks performed by our visual system. How do cells communicate to each other, how do they integrate information, how can we understand neural coding, and what is the role of different cell types? I hope to be able to dissect some of these questions here at the Allen Institute by recording directly from structures such as V1 and LGN. I aim to provide large-scale high-quality data that will help to better understand the first stages of visual information processing.