William is a French-Canadian vision neuroscientist who completed his PhD at Macquarie University and returned to the Department of Biomedical Sciences in the Neurobiology of Vital Systems group after two postdocs at the University of Montréal and KU Leuven. His work centres around electrophysiology, optogenetics, animal behaviour and machine learning.

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(1) In a nutshell, my job is to…
Record neurons firing in the brain in response to audio/visual presentation using multi-electrode arrays (brain implants). I then use machine-learning approaches to decode what was being presented, to try to see what was “being seen”.

(2) The question I hear most often in my work is…
“You need another computer? Again?”

(3) The thing I find most rewarding in my role is…
Using fake brains (artificial neural networks) to understand real ones, in order to develop better fake brains to improve real ones – such as developing new audio/visual prostheses. Having the chance to do that as a job is amazing.

(4) This year I want to…
Finally get out the major papers I have been working on for so long.

 (5) The bravest thing I’ve done is…
Completely switch field for my first postdoc and learn to code in my thirties.

(6) A place that’s special to me is…
The Mile-End neighbourhood in Montréal.

(7) My mother/father always told me…
“What is it you are doing again?”

(8) My guilty pleasure is…
I have done a postdoc in Leuven, so I will have to go with Belgian beers. Especially Gueuzes.

(9) I’m scared of…
Bugs in my code. In a regular hour-long session, I might be recording more than one million action-potentials coming from about 50 neurons responding to 10,000 visual stimulations over three billion time-points. Automation is an amazing, but very scary thing.

(10) My hidden talent is…
Cooking. I am a firm believer that pharmacological gastronomy will one day be a thing. I worked during my PhD on a family of receptors, the TRP channels, which are activated by a variety of herbs and spices.

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You can learn more about William’s amazing work at an upcoming event Brain-Computer Interfaces and Brain-Inspired AI – Wednesday 4 September.