María V. Sanchez-Vives, MD, PhD in Neurosciences, has been ICREA Research Professor at the IDIBAPS (Institut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer) since 2008, where she is Head of the Systems Neuroscience group. She is also co-Director of the Event Lab (Experimental Virtual Environments in Neuroscience and Technology) and Adjunct Professor at the Dept. of Basic Physiology, University of Barcelona. She previously held a position as Associate Professor of Physiology and Group Leader at the Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante (UMH-CSIC). She was Postdoctoral Fellow at Rockefeller University and Postdoctoral and Research Associate scientist at Yale University. Her independent research has been supported by national and international agencies. Since 2013 she is Chief Editor of Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.

Research interests

Cellular and synaptic properties as well as connectivity determine the emergent activity generated by neuronal networks. I am interested in different aspects of spontaneous rhythmic neural activity: its regulating mechanisms, the information it encodes, and the consequences of this activity upon the network. In my group we study these aspects from an experimental and computational approach. Regarding the processed information, the work of my group has included different sensory systems as well as spatial processing occurring in the hippocampal complex. The integration of the cortical information giving rise to bodily representation and the combination of brain-computer interfaces and virtual reality for understanding these processes is another research line that we are pursuing.