George Kafetzis

Evolutionary Neuroscientist | Comparative & Systems Neuroscience | Sensory Circuits Architecture & Function

The retina - strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians..

..so how did it evolve?
Which circuit motifs and computations are truly ancient and which are recently derived, tailored to the needs of particular vertebrate lineages?

I study the emergence and evolution of visual circuit design
- using the catshark retina as a comparative model system
- integrating single-cell transcriptomics, connectomics and electrophysiology

And yes, a sizeable amount of reading.

More broadly, I am interested in how evolutionarily grounded principles of information encoding and circuit architecture can inspire cross-disciplinary approaches; in computational modeling, translational neuroscience and applied biology.
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Brief Bio

PhD Neuroscience "Vision at the Origin of Vertebrate Life" - University of Sussex, UK
MSc Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience - Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen, Germany
BSc Biology - University of Crete, Greece

Best talk/best poster awards on different occasions.

Have hosted and organised >70 visual neuroscience talks
within the WorldWideNeuro initiative.
All talks are publicly available on the BadenLab Youtube channel.