Yasser Roudi recognized
The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters has named NTNU’s Yasser Roudi as the 2013 recipient of the Society’s scientific award for young researchers (IK Lykke Fund). The announcement was made Friday, 8 March. Yasser Roudi, a group leader and scientist at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, is just 31 years old but has contributed significantly to the development of a new discipline – theoretical neuroscience. His work in this new field has been internationally recognized.
Roudi studied physics at Sharif University in Tehran – the leading technical university in Iran – where he completed his degree at the age of 20. He was then admitted to a doctoral programme at the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, the youngest in the institute's history. He defended his doctorate in 2005 as a 24-year-old. He has had a string of successes since, including the award of the prestigious Bogue Scholarship when he was a postdoc at the Gatsby Computational Unit at University College London, for collaboration with researchers at Cornell University. After 3 years at the Gatsby, Roudi moved to the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm and in 2010, took a permanent research position in theoretical and computational neuroscience at the Kavli Institute at NTNU.
Dual expertise
Professor Roudi is interested in understanding the basic principles of information processing in living organisms and machines. To further this understanding, he has worked across disciplines in ways that few others have done before. His work is rooted in quantitative and analytical methods that he has sometimes developed itself. He has shown how neural codes can occur as a result of interactions between thousands of nerve cells. The application of methods from theoretical physics to biological problems requires considerable insight into how biological mechanisms actually work. Yasser is one of very few researchers in the world who has the necessary dual expertise to do this kind of work.
Roudi has also been active in the development of neural network models and techniques for high-throughput data analysis. As a doctoral candidate, he solved a well-known problem in theoretical neuroscience, related to how neural networks can represent continuous and discontinuous variables at the same time. As a postdoc, he developed new models for network coding, and he changed established perceptions of how much information could be stored in realistic neural networks. In recent years, Roudi has been engaged in using methods from statistical mechanics for the reconstruction of biological networks from experimental data. This is a rapidly growing field with applications in neuroscience as well as genetics and machine learning. After his move to NTNU, he developed a new network model that explains how the grid cells in the brain’s sense of location can occur in competitive networks.
International recognition
Yasser Roudi’s research has been published in the most prestigious journals for theoretical physics. His latest models of grid cells have been published as two articles in Nature Neuroscience. He has given lectures at the world’s most prestigious departments in theoretical physics and neuroscience, he has been a reviewer for leading journals, and he has organized several international workshops at NTNU and elsewhere in Scandinavia, where he has been able to get the strongest researchers in their fields to participate. Roudi is currently building a young and active research group that is working at the intersection of statistical physics and neuroscience. His work is funded by the EU, he is a mentor to both postdocs and PhD students, and he has hosted a number of foreign guest researchers. He is without a doubt a researcher who will contribute to NTNU’s international reputation for years to come.
