Matteo Carandini


Matteo Carandini is a neuroscientist who studies the visual system. He received a PhD in Neural Science from New York University and continued as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. After holding positions in Zurich and in San Francisco at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, he is currently a Professor at University College London, where he co-directs the with Kenneth D Harris.
He studies the visual cortex at the level of individual neurons and populations of neurons, their intercommunication within the visual cortex, with a particular interest in the functions of the eye, thalamus, and the early visual areas of the cerebral cortex. Carandini conducts his research with the goal of contributing to the knowledge of how the brain processes visual information in the human brain and he works primarily with mice.
His grandfather was ambassador Nicolo Carandini, and his uncle is archaeologist Andrea Carandini.

Achievements

In the 1990s, working with David Heeger and J. Anthony Movshon he refined and provided evidence for Heeger's normalization model of V1 responses.
Together with David Ferster he characterized the relationship between synaptic excitation, synaptic inhibition, membrane potential, and firing rate in visual cortex and discovered that prolonged visual stimulation causes a tonic hyperpolarization in V1 neurons, characterization of fast adaptive mechanisms in the responses of the early visual system, a comparison with the properties of natural images and a test of the resulting models in the responses to complex natural stimuli.
More recent work concerns the way that non-visual information affects activity in the classical visual system, including the discovery that neurons in primary visual cortex encode information about an animal's location in space, a property previously thought to be restricted to higher-order brain systems such as place cells. Carandini has contributed to the development of Neuropixels probes, and is a founding member of the International Brain Laboratory.