Christian Vestergaard is a researcher at the Pasteur Institute where he is a group leader in the joint Pasteur–Inria lab Decision and Bayesian Computation – Epiméthée. He obtained a PhD in from the Technical University of Denmark (2012) in the field of single molecule biophysics, followed by a postdoctoral appointment at the Center for Theoretical Physics (CPT) in Marseille, France, before joining the Pasteur Institute as a CNRS researcher in 2017. He currently holds a chair at the PaRis Artificial Intelligence Research InstitutE (PRAIRIE).
His research focuses on linking the complex topology of the neural network that makes up an animal’s brain to how it computes and generates behavior, drawing on tools from graph theory, statistical physics, information theory, and machine learning. Focusing on small animals, such as Drosophila larva, whose neural wiring has been mapped at full resolution and whose neurons can be individually controlled in freely behaving animals, he aims to link the structures of neural microcircuits to their functions and uncover the particularities of biological neural networks and what makes them so efficient compared to current artificial neural networks.