Pieter Roelfsema

Biography

Pieter R. Roelfsema received his MD in 1991 and his PhD in 1995. Since 2002 he has worked at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, where he served as director from 2007 to 2023. He is a Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at the Department of Neurosurgery of the Amsterdam University Medical Center, as well as being affiliated with the Institut de la Vision in Paris. He has been awarded the NWO-VICI grant (2008) and two ERC Advanced Grants (2014, 2022).

His research focuses on visual perception, plasticity, memory, and consciousness, studied in experimental animals, humans, and neural networks. He investigates how neurons across brain areas cooperate during seeing and thinking, and how networks reconfigure themselves during learning. Professor Roelfsema also develops neurotechnology for visual prostheses, aiming to restore rudimentary vision in blind individuals. He coordinates the Dutch neurotechnology initiative NeuroTech-NL and in 2019 co-founded Phosphoenix, a start-up developing visual brain prostheses.