For years now, neuroscience has been ripe to benefit from the kind of interaction between theorists and experimentalists that physics and chemistry has enjoyed over the centuries. I will provide insights into the nature of this interdisciplinary enterprise, and describe how it impacts the talent pool for R&D in e.g. bionics, photonics and AI. I will illustrate the process using examples from my own sensory neurophysics research. This activity continues to enrich applied mathematics and physics more generally, with particular impact on R&D that relies heavily on computation.

Bio:

André Longtin holds the University Research Chair in Neurophysics at the University of Ottawa. He is also Chair of the Physics Department, and cross-appointed to Mathematics and Statistics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and directs the Centre for Neural Dynamics. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from U. Montréal, Ph.D. in Physics from McGill, and did an NSERC postdoctoral fellow in the Theoretical Division 13 (Complex Systems) at Los Alamos National Laboratory before becoming assistant professor in Ottawa in 1992. He was awarded the NSERC Brockhouse prize in 2017 (with Len Maler) for interdisciplinary work at the interface of nonlinear physics and neuroscience.