Scientific Calendar Event



Starts 29 Jun 2018 18:30
Ends 29 Jun 2018 19:30
Central European Time
ICTP, Trieste, Italy
Leonardo Building - Budinich Lecture Hall
Strada Costiera 11 34151 Trieste Italy
The 2017 ICTP Prize Ceremony takes place on Friday 29 June 2018 at 18.30 hrs (NB: new time!) in the Budinich Lecture Hall, and takes place during the Summer School on Cosmology 2018 (smr 3213). ICTP has awarded its 2017 ICTP Prize to Emilio Kropff, a neuroscientist from Argentina affiliated with that country’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council’s (CONICET) Instituto de Investigeciones Bioquimicas de Buenos Aires (IIBBA), Leloir Institute, and an ICTP Associate. Each year, the ICTP Prize is given in honor of a scientist who has made outstanding contributions to the field in which the prize is given. The 2017 ICTP Prize honors Daniel J. Amit, a theoretical physicist who pioneered statistical mechanics approaches to neural networks and was one of the founding fathers of modern theoretical and computational neuroscience. The title of the talk is: "Space, time, speed and acceleration in the brain's GPS". The Ceremony will be livestreamed from the ICTP website. All are most welcome to attend.
Emilio Kropff was born in Bariloche, Argentina. He studied Physics in the University of Buenos Aires, where in 2003 he defended his thesis on the statistical mechanics of simple unsupervised learning models. In 2007 he got his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at SISSA (Trieste) under the supervision of Alessandro Treves, defending his thesis on analytical and computational models of human semantic memory. The next year he moved to the Kavli Institute in Trondheim, Norway, as a postdoc fellow under the supervision of Edvard and May-Britt Moser (Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine, 2014). The experiments he performed in Norway led to the discovery of speed cells, a previously unknown neural type belonging to the GPS circuity. In 2012 he established in Buenos Aires, where he is a national council (CONICET) researcher at the Leloir Institute. He currently works on electrical and optical recordings of neural activity in behaving rodents, complemented with analytical and computational models, with the aim of understanding how mammals form memories and orient themselves in space. His work has been published in high impact journals such as Science and Nature. Recent honors include the FIMA-LELOIR prize (2017), the Grass Fellowship (2018) and the ICTP prize (2017).