Haim Sompolinsky Lab

ELSC Members

Haim Sompolinsky

Professor Emeritus

Phone: +972-54-8820754
Address: The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences
The Suzanne and Charles Goodman Brain Sciences Building,
Level 2, Room 1201, Edmond J. Safra Campus,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 9190401
William N. Skirball Chair in Neurophysics, Emeritus

Sompolinsky’s research goal is to uncover the fundamental principles of the organization, the dynamics and the function of the brain, viewing the brain through multiscale lenses, spanning the molecular, the cellular, and the circuit levels. To achieve this goal, Sompolinsky has developed new theoretical approaches to computational neuroscience based on the principles and methods of statistical physics, and physics of dynamical and stochastic systems. This new field, Neurophysics, builds in part on Sompolinsky’s earlier work on critical phenomena, random systems, spin glasses, and chaos. His research areas cover theoretical and computational investigations of cortical dynamics, sensory processing, motor control, neuronal population coding, long and short-term memory, and neural learning. The highlights of his research include theories and models of local cortical circuits, visual cortex, associative memory, statistical mechanics of learning, chaos and excitation-inhibition balance in neuronal networks, principles of neural population codes, statistical mechanics of compressed sensing and sparse coding in neuronal systems, and the Tempotron model of spike time based neural learning. He also studies the neuronal mechanisms of volition and the impact of physics and neuroscience on the foundations of human freedom and agency.

Lectures

klop-205
Ivon Ben Zaken
Lab Manager
תמונה מיאדה
Miada Abu salih
Ph.D. Student
WhatsApp Image 2025-11-10 at 21.49.33
Francis Mitri
Ph.D. Student
Untitled-design-30-e1760855344696
Abhishek Jangid
Ph.D. Student
איוש_Photo
Aayush Banerjee
Ph.D. Student
Dey, T., Basu, R., and Ghosh, S.K.

Exp. Parasitol. 123, 244–249. (2009)

Basu, R., Taylor, M.R., and Williams, M.E.

Cell Adh Migr 9, 193–201. (2015)

Martin, E.A., Muralidhar, S., Wang, Z., Cervantes, D.C., Basu, R., Taylor, M.R., Hunter, J., Cutforth, T., Wilke, S.A., Ghosh, A., et al.

eLife 4, e09395 (2015)

Sabarinathan, R.*, Basu, R.*, and Sekar, K. (*co-first authors)

Comput Biol Chem 34, 126–130 (2010)

Basu, R.*, Gebauer, R., Herfurth, T., Kolb, S., Golipour, Z., Tchumatchenko, T., and Ito, H.T. *( Corresponding authors)

Nature. 599, 449-452. (2021)

Basu, R., Duan, X., Taylor, M.R., Martin, E.A., Muralidhar, S., Wang, Y., Gangi-Wellman, L., Das, S.C., Yamagata, M., West, P.J., et al.

Neuron 96, 160–176.e8.  (2017)

Interested in joining our lab? We have positions open for students (both Masters and PhD), and postdocs. PhD students can join my lab through the ELSC’s graduate program (https://elsc.huji.ac.il/education/graduate-program/ph-d-in-brain-sciences/), or you can email me directly with your CV. For postdoc positions, please attach your CV, along with a one-page document describing your proposed research project.

Raunak Basu

Assistant Professor

Phone: +972-25494569
Address: The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences
The Suzanne and Charles Goodman Brain Sciences Building,
Edmond J. Safra Campus,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 9190401

“Working memory”