James Kozloski IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (kozloskius.ibm.com). In 1999, Dr. Kozloski received his Ph.D. degree in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. He subsequently held a research position at Columbia University in the lab of Dr. Rafael Yuste, where he discovered stereotyped positions of local synaptic targets in neocortex. He joined the research staff of IBM in 2001, and in 2006, he was also named Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia. Dr. Kozloski's research interests, primarily in computational biology, include structural biology, neural system modeling, functional simulations of neocortex, and molecular biology. He invents in the area of neurotechnology, and designs parallel computing software architectures and interfaces for both simulation and data analysis problems in neuroscience.

Konstantinos Sfyrakis Blue Brain Laboratory, Brain Mind Institute, Faculté des Sciences de la Vie, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland (konstantinos.sfyrakisepfl.ch). In 2001, Dr. Sfyrakis received his Ph.D. degree in computational chemistry at Surrey University, School of Biomedical and Molecular Science, United Kingdom. He subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Bernoulli Institute of Mathematics, at EPFL, Switzerland, before joining the Research and Development Group of the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL. Currently, he designs and writes computing software applications and interfaces for scientific problems in neuroscience.

Sean Hill IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center and the Blue Brain Project, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Station 15, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland (sehzurich.ibm.com). In 2000, Dr. Hill received his Ph.D. degree in computational neuroscience from the University of Lausanne. He subsequently joined the Research Group of Dr. Giulio Tononi at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and then moved with Dr. Tononi to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2001. He has developed numerous large-scale models of neural systems and is the designer and developer of the general-purpose neural simulator, Synthesis. As part of his postdoctoral research, he developed the first large-scale thalamocortical model that replicates neural activity during wakefulness and sleep. He joined IBM Research and the Blue Brain Project in May 2006 and now serves as Project Manager for computational neuroscience area. His research interests include the use of large-scale biologically realistic computer models to understand information processing, network connectivity, and synaptic plasticity in the brain.

Felix Schürmann Blue Brain Laboratory, Brain Mind Institute, Faculté des Sciences de la Vie, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland (felix.schuermannepfl.ch). Dr. Schürmann is the General Project Manager of the Blue Brain Project and a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain Mind Institute at the EPFL. He started his studies of physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, supported by the German National Academic Foundation. He obtained his M.S. degree in physics from the State University of New York, Buffalo, under the supervision of Richard Gonsalves. During this time, he was a Fulbright Scholar. His master's thesis dealt with the foundations of computing, including the simulation of quantum computing. In 2005, he received his Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, under the supervision of Karlheinz Meier. His work focused on alternative approaches to computing. Using mixed-signal very-large-scale integration (VLSI), he co-designed an efficient implementation of a neural network in hardware and was the first to adopt the theory of liquid computing in hardware.

Charles Peck IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (cpeckus.ibm.com). In 1994, Dr. Peck received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Cincinnati. He currently leads the Biometaphorical Computing Research Group at IBM, dedicated to analyzing and modeling the brain for scientific, medical, and technology applications. This work includes data-driven modeling via the Blue Brain collaboration with Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, as well as theory-driven modeling of global brain function and individual structures, such as the cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. In 1998, while at the Lockheed Martin Corporation, Dr. Peck was awarded the NOVA Award for Technical Excellence, the corporation's highest honor. He was also selected by the National Academy of Engineering as one of America's top young engineers.

Henry Markram Blue Brain Laboratory, Brain Mind Institute, Faculaté des Sciences de la Vie, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland (henry.markramepfl.ch). Project Director of the Blue Brain Project, Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Technology, and Co-director of the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL, Dr. Markram received his Ph.D. degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science, was a Fulbright Scholar at the National Institutes of Health, and a Minerva Fellow in the Laboratory of Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute, Heidelberg, Germany. Dr. Markram's many discoveries include being the first to alter the precise relative timing of single presynaptic and postsynaptic action-potentials to reveal spike timing-dependent synaptic plasticity. As an assistant professor at the Weizmann Institute for Science, Israel, he began systematically analyzing the neocortical column, discovering novel synaptic learning mechanisms and a spectrum of new principles governing neocortical microcircuit structure and function. Together with Wolfgang Maass, he developed the theory of liquid computing. In 2002, he moved to EPFL as full professor, founder, and director of the Brain Mind Institute as well as director of the Center for Neuroscience and Technology.