Gilles Laurent was born in Casablanca in 1960 and spent his childhood in Morocco. He studied veterinary medicine, and obtained a PhD in Neuroethology in Toulouse, France in 1985, before moving to Cambridge, England, as a postdoctoral fellow with Malcolm Burrows, FRS, and as a Locke Research Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1990, he joined the Biology faculty of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA, USA where he stayed for 20 years. In 2009, he took on a director’s position at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, where he is now located. He is a member of EMBO, of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He received the 2025 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the 2025 Karl Spencer Lashley Prize.
Laurent is interested in the function and modes of operation of neuronal circuits, with a particular interest in network dynamics and in evolution. His interests range from olfactory circuit dynamics to sleep and to visual texture perception, as expressed by camouflaging cephalopods. Having worked on a wide range of species—insects, cephalopods, reptiles and mammals—he is particularly interested in the evolutionary convergence of brain computation.
Professional position
- Director, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Max Planck Society
