I am fascinated by the elegance of the neuronal computational processes that take place in the retina., the neuronal network I have been studying for the past 20 years. I started my work in the retina in the laboratory of Medical Physics in Amsterdam in 1985 where I obtained my PhD in 1989. After a postdoctoral period in with Frank Werblin at the University of California at Berkeley, I continue working on the retina at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). At present I am a groupleader in the NIN and professor in the Neurophysiology in the Academic Medical Center (AMC) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA).
The retina is part of the central nervous system. It is one of the very few, maybe the only, part of the central nervous system from which we know its input, its function, and its output. This system offers therefore the unique opportunity to perform an input/output analysis, and to ask questions dealing with neuronal coding and the efficiency of such coding. In this system, we can really study what the neural code is. Although we know a lot about neuronal diseases, neuronal function, action potentials and synaptic transmission, real insight in neuronal coding is largely lacking. My research team tries to elucidate the coding schemes the retina uses.