Olaf Sporns

Olaf Sporns was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1963. After pursuing an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen, he received a PhD in neuroscience from Rockefeller University (New York) in 1990. Following his PhD, he conducted postdoctoral work at The Neurosciences Institute in New York and San Diego. Currently he is a Provost Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University in Bloomington, a member of the Graduate Programs in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience, and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. He received the Distinguished Faculty Award from Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2011.

Sporns’ main research area is theoretical and computational neuroscience, with an emphasis on complex systems, brain connectivity, and neurorobotics. His work aims to uncover the network principles that underlie the architecture and function of the human brain. He is particularly interested in how the human connectome, the complete set of all structural connections of the human brain, shape and constrain functional brain dynamics, and how disruptions of anatomical connections may relate to neural and mental diseases. Sporns is a co-investigator in several federally and privately funded research projects as well as a contributor to a number of training grants. He teaches a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses and has participated in several national and international summer schools in the areas of computational neuroscience and complex systems. Over his career, Sporns has authored over 130 peer-reviewed publications as well as the recent books "Networks of the Brain" and "Discovering the Human Connectome", both published by MIT Press. Sporns serves on the editorial boards of ten scientific journals, including as a Section Editor at PLoS ONE and Deputy Editor at PLoS Computational Biology.