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).