Nicolas MEIRHAEGHE

At any given instant, billions of neurons in our brains are lighting up in a complicated yet highly coordinated manner to give rise to our thoughts, percepts, and movements. A single neuron may be connected to thousands of other cells, sending out and receiving information through electrical impulses called “spikes” that may be viewed as “ones and zeros” rapidly unfolding in time. Ultimately, this underlying activity reflects the ongoing computations taking place inside the nervous system, and as such, constitutes a window into the brain’s inner workings. In his work, Nicolas Meirhaeghe aims to decipher the logic by which these complex patterns of activity support our complex behaviors, such as planning an action, learning from our mistakes, or even formulating a lie.

His research has received financial support from various entities, including the European Molecular Biology Organization and the European Union (Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship), and has been awarded the 2026 Bernard Bioulac Prize by the CNRS Foundation.

Initially trained as an aerospace engineer at Supaéro and Caltech, Nicolas Meirhaeghe [“Mérag”] received his PhD in computational systems neurosciences from MIT, working under the guidance of Mehrdad Jazayeri from 2016 to 2021. He then completed his postdoctoral training as an EMBO and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the team of Thomas Brochier from 2021 to 2025, before being recruited as a CNRS researcher at the Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone in 2025.

Link to the lab website: https://mindlaboratory.org/

Neural basis of high-level cognition, planning, anticipation, learning, internal models, neural population dynamics, computational neuroscience