Team Cortical Dynamics and Sensory Mechanisms (Dr L BOURDIEU)
Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure
ENS CNRS UMR8197 INSERM U1024, Paris, France
Walther Akemann is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Laurent Bourdieu at the Biology Department of École Normale Supérieur in Paris. He received his PhD from Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf (Germany), performed postdoctoral studies at the Helmholtz Research Center in Juelich (Germany), at the CEA Research Center in Saclay (France) and at the University of Paris-Sud (Paris XI), before becoming a staff scientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Center in Wako-City (Japan). Walther’s interests include molecular probing, cellular electrophysiology and behavior-associated computations in neural circuits. Since 2013, Walther is working with Laurent Bourdieu, Jean-Francois Léger, Vincent Villette and Stéphane Dieudonné to develop optical methods for fast functional brain imaging in mice.
The study of neural activity across tens to thousands of cells is a rapidly developing field, particularly through advances in two-photon microscopy. The goal of the team led by Laurent Bourdieu is to study the spatial and temporal organization of brain activity at the level of local neural networks and to understand some rules governing sensory information encoding in the rodent cortex. These issues are mainly addressed using two-photon microscopy, a technique that the team is constantly trying to improve in terms of temporal resolution, sensitivity and penetration depth.
