Hi everyone,
to get to know each other a bit, feel free to reply to this topic and introduce yourself!
Please share whatever you are comfortable with. It could be a simple hi, some details about you, about your work, or your general interests.
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I’ll make a start! I’m Marcel, I grew up and did most of my studies in Berlin, Germany, but have been living for the last 8 years in Paris, France. I work at the Institut de la Vision where most researchers work on fancy science I know nothing about 
I do know a bit about computational neuroscience, though, and have been one of the main developers of the Brian simulators for a couple of years.
Beyond neuroscience, I’m into the more general Open Source and Open Science movement, and try to do my part so that researchers can do reliable (computational) science with less pain and in less time.
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OK me too. I’m Dan, originally a Londoner, then peripatetically living in differnet parts of the UK, France and US for 16 years before finally moving back to London as a faculty member at Imperial College. I started my academic life as a mathematician before moving into computational neuroscience, building the Brian simulator as my first big project, and then working in auditory neuroscience, modelling and experimental work. These days I’m mostly focussed on trying to use techniques from machine learning to throw light on how the brain works.
Like Marcel I’m also into open source and open science. The big thing I’ve worked on in this area is the Neuromatch organisation which I started with Konrad Kording.
I’m also into politics, philosophy, cooking and general nerdiness (scifi/fantasy/gaming).
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I’m Romain, I have been living in Paris for about 20 years. I’m currently working in the Vision Institute where I lead a computational neuroscience team. I was trained initially in math and computer science, then went into theoretical neuroscience. I had worked on simulation algorithms for spiking models (mostly event-driven) before I met Dan (who started a postdoc with me on synfire chains, if I remember correctly). I had learned Python the summer before (2007?), and we decided to do the Brian simulator. Later on, Marcel joined the lab (to do some auditory computational neuroscience) and gradually took a greater part in the development of Brian. Nowadays, my involvement in the development of Brian is minimal; my most recent contributions in the code are the development of multicompartmental modelling and the initial work on the model fitting toolbox.
My current scientific interests are mainly spike initiation and sensorimotor modeling; in particular, I am trying to develop an integrative model of a swimming unicellular organism which also spikes, named Paramecium. I am also interested in philosophical questions (in particular epistemology).
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That’s right. We never did finish that synfire chains project…
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Thank you for preparing this environment,
I am Abolfazl, I am living in Iran, with background of physics, and I have almost just finished my PhD at computational neuroscience. I have worked on synchronization of hierarchical network, information theory and structure-dynamic iterplay on connectome with delayed interactions.
Now iI am working on simulation of Basal Ganglia and trying to understand the Parkinson disease.
My pleasure to be here.
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Welcome! And congratulations on being the first poster in our new community. 
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Hello everyone, I’m Vigneswaran and just finished my undergrad degree (amidst this pandemic ). I grew up and did all my education in a small town called Thanjavur in India. Recently, I joined as a Research Assistant in Computational Neuroscience lab, Indian Institute of Technology - Madras.
I came to know about Brian when I was looking to apply for GSoC’19 and eventually got selected this year. For the past three months under the guidance of Marcel Stimberg, I’m working on creating a standard way to describe Brian models, and use them to export human-readable markdown descriptions (and existing NeuroML export). The new forum looks very cool and happy to be here.
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Hi there! My name’s Felix, I’m a postdoc with Zenas Chao at the International Research Center for Neurointelligence, UTokyo. I’ve recently picked up Brian to build models of (auditory) cortex in an attempt to learn something about how we learn sequences, and/or to find out if/how predictive coding might be implemented in cortical circuits.
Before Tokyo, I completed a PhD at Sussex University, UK, with Thomas Nowotny (co-author of Brian2GeNN), working on dynamic clamp and closed-loop model optimisation. I maintain the dynamic clamp software StdpC and, if I stick with spiking models for my current main project, I will likely end up contributing to Brian2GeNN to make offloading Brian simulations onto the GPU even more convenient.
Since I’ve moved to Japan mere weeks before the pandemic got properly started, I’ve learned to resent the fact that Earth is round; I would much prefer a situation in which the sun rises and sets everywhere around the same time. 
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Hi Felix - welcome! Great to hear you’re doing auditory stuff. 
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Hi Everyone!
I am Reza, my background is in physics and now working in Theoretical Neuroscience. I am doing my master thesis on information theory and its application in neural data analysis with Stefano Panzeri and Mathew Diamond at SISSA, Trieste, Italy. I have been using Brain2 for different projects including how external input and homeostasis plasticity can determine the dynamical state of recurrent neural networks.
Great to be hear!
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Hi everyone,
Thank you so much for the invitation. My name is Michalis Pagkalos and I am a Ph.D. student at IMBB-FoRTH in Greece, working at the lab of Yiota Poirazi (aka “The dendrites lab”). My background is in Molecular Biology but the past 2+ years I have fallen in love with computational Neuroscience. I am currently studying by means of computational modeling how dendritic mechanisms contribute to hippocampal learning and memory. As a side-project, I developed a Python framework (hopefully it will be out soon) that helps to model dendrites in Brian 2. I am very glad to be a member of this forum 
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We’re looking forward to seeing your package released Michalis! I’ve been wanting to tell a few people about it.
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After some extensive, real-life testing we improved it a lot and added some extra features. I cannot wait to share it with you. I am currently preparing the manuscript followed by some jupyter notebooks. I lost some time because of Neuromatch but I am doing my best now to finish it now 
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Hi there,
I’m Ruben Tikidji-Hamburyan or rth for short. Originally from Russia, I’ve been living in the US for almost 10 years. I got MS in Laser Physics and Ph.D. in computer science quite a while ago, but in the last 20+ years, I’m doing Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience with rapture. In Russia, I had my independent research group and tenure position but decided (very timely ) to pursue an international career and became a PostDoc again. Currently, I’m a senior research scientist at Georg Washington University (D.C.).
I always think that Computational Neuroscience is a pretty addictive computer game. Really! In a game, one tries to get to the goal by controlling some virtual person, right? Well in computational neuroscience, we try to control a model to achieve the goal - behave like rial neurons or networks. I quite often ask myself: “How many times, I have to jump in this corner to make this model work?!” So, as you can see, I’m having fun here.
From my point of view, Neuroscience is a very special science: the first time in the history of science, we know for sure that the complexity of the object which is studied is equal to the complexity of the researcher! We are studying the brain by our brains! So if anyone will tell you, that she/he knows how the brain works, this person should have an enormous brain much bigger than any other. It isn’t obviously my case, therefore I prefer to load everything in good computer clusters, and just during tea, while they do the job. It feels we are entering a new era of scientific discoveries when we aren’t gain knowledge, but obtain a model that can answer any of our questions about the brain. That may be, that model will be written in Brain, why not?
P.S. I’m horrible in any natural language, so expect lots of typos and unclear messages from me. Please ask if something looks strange in my posts, probably I meant something different 
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Hey there! Thanks for setting up the forum, looking great!
I’m Denis and I’m a PhD student in the Sprekelerlab at TU Berlin, working on Systems Memory Consolidation. I’m not really using Brian in my research right now (it’s all pretty non-spiking currently), but during my Master’s I developed together with Moritz Augustin the Brian extension Brian2CUDA. We didn’t quite get it wrapped up before we ran out of time so it has been sitting idle for a while now (unfortunately). But I’m back on it and aiming to finally get it out in the next weeks. 
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Woohoo! I’m very excited to have a play with the working version of that.
Hello Marcel,
Thank you for your invitation, I am a 1995 MD 1999-PhD in neuroscience with a work about synchronous discharges in the cat superior colliculus. Unfortunately, my postdoc is postponed because the MRI evidenced a SUSAC syndrome. As is my academical trajectory. In 2016, we created the clubhouse Brussels.
Quentin
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Hi Everyone,
My name is Vincenzo Marra, I am a neurophysiologist interested in synaptic and non-synaptic plasticity (if these terms still make sense).
I have used Brian2 for fun as most of the model I have needed in the past were easier to implement using other simulation environments.
I am very excited by the multicompartment modelling mentioned by @romainbrette and the recent(ish) use of BRIAN2 for modelling Neuron-Glia interaction via extracellular space.
I hope to be able to use BRIAN2 as part of some of my passion projects and I look forward to interacting with the rest of the community.
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