Curriculum Vitae: Education: 1979-1982  BSc. in Mathematics and Physics (with special distinction), The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel 1984-1985  M.Sc. in Neurobiology (with distinction), Department of Physiology, The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School,                                                        Jerusalem, Israel   1987-1991  Ph.D. in Neurobiology, Department of Physiology, The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel 1991-1994  Postdoctoral fellow, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, USA  Positions: 1993-2000  Lecturer, Department of Physiology, The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel   2000-2003  Senior Lecturer (with tenure), Department of Physiology, The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School                                          2003-2005  Senior Lecturer (with tenure), Department of Neurobiology, The Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, the Hebrew                             University, Jerusalem, Israel 2005-2008  Associate Professor, Department of Neurobiology, The Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel   2008-present Full Professor, Department of Neurobiology, The Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, and the Edmond                                                 and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel                                             Other academic roles in the Hebrew University: 1998-2000  Member, M.D. theses committee 2000 - 2001  Member, computer committee of the Hebrew University – Hadassah Medical School 2000 -  present  Member, the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computations, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel 2003 - 2007   Chairman, the graduate program in Brain and Behavioral Sciences 3/2008 -  present  Head, Ph.D. program ‘Brain Research: Computation and Information Processing’ 2009-         Head, Institutional Committee for the Care and Use of Animals (IACUC), Edmond J. Safra Campus 2012-         Member, executive committee, Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences  Other academic roles: 1999-  Action Editor, The Journal of Computational Neuroscience 2007-  Associate editor, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience 2005-2008  Director, the European course in Neural Computations (Arcachon and Freiburg, together with Nicolas Brunel, Peter Latham and John                           Rinzel) 3/2010  Member of the Gatsby Unit Quinquennial review committee 2011-    Member of the advisory board, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Munich, Germany Member of the Israeli Society for Neuroscience (ISFN), Society for Neuroscience (SFN), Association for Research in Otolaryngology                     (ARO) Ad-hoc reviewer in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, Cerebral Cortex, Journal of Neurophysiology,                       and others. Scientific Interests: I study the coding of natural and naturalistic sounds in the auditory system. My current work centers around the notion of ‘surprise’ – the occurrence of sounds that are unexpected either because they are rare or because they occur at an unexpected location in the sequence. I study responses to surprise at three levels. Phenomenologically, I describe the responses to surprise in different contexts and with different types of sound ensembles in cortex as well as in the preceding stations, in order to find those features of the responses to surprise that are computed specifically in auditory cortex. Mechanistically, apply state-of-the-art imaging and optogenetic techniques to record from multiple neurons simultaneously and to manipulate selectively subclasses of neurons in order to uncover the mechanisms that underlie these responses in auditory cortex. Finally, I collaborate with theoreticians (most fruitfully with Prof. Naftali Tishby) to describe normatively what is exactly surprise and how should responses to surprise depend on the past stimulation sequence. My future work will include recordings in awake rats in naturalistic environments in order to study the role of surprise detection in guiding behavior.