Our Team
Postdocs
Pau Vilimalis Aceituno
pau(at)ini.ethz.ch
Pau Vilimelis Aceituno
I am a theoretician at the interface between Neuroscience, Machine Learning and Neuromorphic Computing. Using Information Theory, Signal Processing, Random Matrices and Graph Theory, I look for theories and principles that explain how neural networks learn and compute in brains and machines. I also have a general interest (and occasional projects) in other fields such as ecology or economics. Previously I have worked on designing satellites, software for error-prone hardware, data mining for airline IT, and time-series processing for microbiomes.
Elisabeth Abs
elisabeth(at)ini.ethz.ch
Elisabeth Abs
I am a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow in the lab and in general, I am interested in understanding how the brain learns and past experience shapes future behaviours. I obtained a BSc in Mol. Biotechnology from Heidelberg University and a MSc in Neuroscience from the University of Rotterdam. During my PhD in the Lab of Johannes Letzkus at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt I studied the auditory cortical circuit involved in fear learning. Currently I investigate how the brain utilises previous knowledge to quickly learn new tasks.
Elisabeth Amadei
lizann(at)ini.ethz.ch
Matteo Saponati
masapo(at)ini.ethz.ch
Matteo Saponati
Hey there, I am a postdoctoral research fellow in the lab and I have specialized in the field of Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning (ML). My focus is on developing innovative ML algorithms by taking inspiration from Neuroscience and implementing these algorithms on novel computing hardware. I am curious about the mechanisms of learning and prediction in both biological and artificial systems. I am a creative individual with a love for art and art production.
PhD-Students
Anh Duong Vo
anhduong.vo(at)ethz.ch
Anh Duong Vo
I am an ETH AI Center Doctoral Fellow. I want to understand mechanisms in the brain and improve machine learning algorithms inspired by neuroscientific findings. I am part of the groups led by Prof. Benjamin Grewe and Prof. Luc Van Gool.
Eduarda Streit Morsch
eduarda(at)ini.ethz.ch
Elvis Nava
elvis.nava(at)ai.ethz.ch
Elvis Nava
I am an ETH AI Center Doctoral Fellow, I am part of Prof. Benjamin Grewe’s group in the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) and Prof. Robert Katzschmann’s Soft Robotics Lab (SRL). My research focus lies at the intersection of Meta-Learning, Representation Learning and Robotics. I seek to further advance our understanding of Meta-Learning as the key for increasing data and compute efficiency in Machine Learning models, with the eventual goal of applying such insights for solving complex Reinforcement Learning and Control tasks in the Robotics domain. I believe that broader and more robust generalization afforded by novel Meta-Learning techniques will lead to shorter development cycles and wider adoption of automation solutions and broadly applicable AI agents. As part of this effort, I aim to take inspiration from biologically sound Neural Network architectures and from computational neuroscience.
Laura Sainz Villalba
laura(at)ini.ethz.ch
Laura Sainz Villalba
Laura received her BSc in Medicine at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2012. She then became a fully trained and certified Neurosurgeon at the Jiménez Díaz Hospital in Madrid, while completing a BSc in Theoretical Physics at the same university. In the Grewe lab, Laura has developed a home cage training fully automated Raspberry Pi-based system and, is utilizing in vivo 2P calcium imaging in awake mice that perform categorization tasks. Her research focuses on the neural correlates of learning and abstraction at the population level in Hippocampus that relate to task and category structure. Other research interests include dynamical systems, information theory, structure learning and, category theory.
Hamza Keurti
hamza(at)ini.ethz.ch
Sander de Haan
Sander de Hann
Sander de Haan is a doctoral student in both computational neuroscience at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich and ethics at the Institute for Social Ethics ISE at the University of
Lucerne. Under Prof. Dr. Benjamin F. Grewe and Prof. Dr. Peter G. Kirchschlaeger, his research focuses on uncovering the fundamental principles in learning systems, both artificial and biological, as well as the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence (AI).
During and next to his Computer Science engineering Masters degree from EPFL, he has done projects and research in theoretical machine learning, deep learning for pose estimation and automatic cell segmentation, and machine learning for medical diagnostics. Auxiliary experience includes: an AI Research Engineering internship at Logitech, creating deep learning models for brain-machine interfaces; data science for medical psychedelic research; and teaching roles at both EPFL and ETHZ.
Philipp Eugster
eugsteph(at)ini.ethz.ch
Philipp Eugster
I am a doctoral student in computational neuroscience at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich. I have a general interest in understanding how the brain internally represents the world and how these representations are learned. More specifically, I am interested in the formation of episodic memories and how they influence behavior. Prior to my doctoral studies, I worked for several years as a laboratory technician in both industry and academia. Subsequently, I pursued a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Sciences at ETH Zurich, with a focus on neuroscience, cell biology, bioinformatics and machine learning.
Yassine Taoudi Benchekroun
ytaoud(at)ini.ethz.ch
Yassine Taoudi Benchekroun
Hi! I am Yassine – born and raised in the sunny and beautiful Morocco.
Since early 2024, I started a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Grewe, where I divide my attention between the topics of Reinforcement Learning, Large Language Models, and AI safety. I also work on the ARC Challenge (https://www.kaggle.com/c/abstraction-and-reasoning-challenge), which I started investigating during my Master’s thesis. Checkout my website (https://yassine.fyi) for open projects and more details about what I do!
In previous lives, I have been a Neural Systems Computation master student at ETH/UZH (2021-2023); a tech project manager for a Moroccan company (2021); a (proudly) failed startup-er (2020), a Machine Learning Engineer at a maritime data analysis company (2019-2020), and a Biomedical Engineer bachelor student at King’s College London (2016-2019).
When I’m not doing science, you can typically find me at one of the Zurich jam-session venues behind the Piano, at the Opera, or running around Zurich.
Visiting PhD
Pascal Sager
sage(at)zhaw.ch
Sager Pascal
I am a PhD candidate at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence (CAI, ZHAW) and a visiting PhD student at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI, UZH/ETH), working under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Thilo Stadelmann and Prof. Dr. Benjamin Grewe. My research focuses on advancing deep learning systems by leveraging insights from neuroscience, specifically enhancing and structuring latent representations. I believe current AI systems can be improved by requiring them to construct models of the world based on disentangled concepts and their relationships, with interactions with the environment being key to developing such representations. In addition to my research, I serve as a board member of the Sustainable Impact Program at ZHAW and am responsible for AI demonstrations and workshops at CAI. Prior to my academic career, I gained extensive experience as a hardware and software engineer in the industry.
Visiting Professors and Scientist
Thilo Stadelmann
thilo.stadelmann(at)zhaw.ch
Thilo Stadelmann
Thilo Stadelmann is professor of AI/ML at the ZHAW School of Engineering in Winterthur, Switzerland, director of the ZHAW Centre for Artificial Intelligence and head of its Machine Perception and Cognition Group. He studied computer science in Giessen and Marburg and received his Doctor of Science degree from Marburg University, Germany, in 2010, where he worked on multimedia analysis and voice recognition. Thilo held engineering and leadership roles in the automotive industry for several years prior to his appointment at the ZHAW. His group focuses on robust deep learning to solve diverse pattern recognition tasks such as document analysis or computer vision for industrial and medical applications. His current research interests include learning actionable representations to build common-sense world models as a next-level paradigm for AI.
Staff
Simone Holler
shr(at)ini.ethz.ch
Simone Holler
Pharmacy are my roots and I worked for a long time in this field. It was the time when Pharmacy was dedicated to do a lot of individual prescription requests, so my main focus was working at Pharmacy Labs. Unfortunately, the individual recipes were gradually replaced by OTC preparations and I knew that’s no longer my goal. The desire to go into research grew stronger and stronger in me and I got the chance to join Prof. Kevan Martins Group at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, as a Lab Technician. We worked together more than 15 year. After Kevan Martin retired, I offered my lab skills to our various other groups at the Institute. My areas of responsibility are including neuroanatomical reconstructions, histology in general, Immunofluorescence staining, Supervision of students in the Histology Lab and now for B. Grewe’s Lab also genotyping of mouse lines.
Alumni
- Matilde Tristany Farinha
- Benjamin Ehret
- Martino Sorbaro
- Maria Cervera de la Rosa