Javier Alegre-Cortés

I’m Javier Alegre Cortés, an MSCA postdoctoral fellow at the Neural circuits and brain dynamics laboratory led by Dr. Nikolas Karalis at the Paris Brain Institute. I am a neurophysiologist interested in how biological mechanisms give rise to coordinated circuit dynamics. My work integrates large-scale neural recordings with biophysically grounded computational models to extract mechanistic insight from high-dimensional neural data.

In my research, I combine electrophysiological recordings — from intracellular dynamics to spiking neuronal populations — with formal models of the same circuits. My principal scientific interest is to understand how cortical and subcortical networks organize their activity, how neuromodulation shapes their dynamical regimes, and how interacting brain areas communicate. By analyzing and modeling both behaviorally driven and spontaneous activity, I aim to move from observed patterns to mechanistic understanding.

I obtained my PhD in Bioengineering, where I investigated how interval timing is integrated into the dynamics of neuronal populations in the deep layers of the visual cortex. Using multielectrode array recordings and nonlinear time–frequency analysis, I studied how temporal structure shapes visual responses at the population level.

During my first postdoctoral position in the  laboratory of Dr. Ramón Reig, I explored the organization of circuits in the mouse dorsal striatum and their integration of cortical slow waves. This work combined intracellular and extracellular recordings with conductance-based computational models to identify candidate mechanisms underlying circuit dynamics.

You can find a summary of my main and secondary projects in the Research section. I also write occasionally about science and the philosophy of science — partly to clarify my own thinking, and partly for the joy of writing. You can find those texts here.

See my list of publications here.

Check also my Github, Twitter, and Bluesky profiles.