Aitor Morales-Gregorio

Computational Neuroscientist a.morales-gregorio@fz-juelich.de

Hello everyone! I am postdoctoral researcher at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (INM-6) studying the activity and structure of the cerebral cortex. I focus in the study of extracellular electrophysiological activity and quantitative analysis of neuroanatomy, mostly for the macaque monkey. My work bridges the gap between experimental and theoretical results by combining both data analysis and mathematical modeling. I am a strong supporter of open code and data, for maximum reproducibility and transparency in science. I never miss the chance to create colorful visualizations to make sense of my results and data.

Publications

Aitor Morales-Gregorio*, Alexander van Meegen*, and Sacha J. van Albada. Ubiquitous lognormal distribution of neuron densities across mammalian cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex (2023).

Xing Chen*, Aitor Morales-Gregorio*, Julia Sprenger, Alexander Kleinjohann, Shashwat Sridhar, Sacha J. van Albada, Sonja Grün, and Pieter R. Roelfsema. 1024-channel electrophysiological recordings in macaque V1 and V4 during resting state. Scientific Data (2022).

Sacha J. van Albada, Aitor Morales-Gregorio, Timo Dickscheid, Alexandros Goulas, Rembrandt Bakker, Sebastian Bludau, Günther Palm, Claus C. Hilgetag, and Markus Diesmann. Bringing Anatomical Information into Neuronal Network Models. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology (2022).

Barna Zajzon, and Aitor Morales-Gregorio. Trans-thalamic Pathways: Strong Candidates for Supporting Communication between Functionally Distinct Cortical Areas. Journal of Neuroscience (2019).

Preprints

Aitor Morales-Gregorio, Anno C. Kurth, Junji Ito, Alexander Kleinjohann, Frédéric Barthélemy, Thomas Brochier, Sonja Grün, Sacha J. van Albada. Neural manifolds in V1 change with top-down signals from V4 targeting the foveal region. bioRxiv (2023).

Jonas Oberste-Frielinghaus, Aitor Morales-Gregorio, Simon Essink, Alexander Kleinjohann, Sonja Grün, Junji Ito. Detection and Removal of Hyper-synchronous Artifacts in Massively Parallel Spike Recordings. bioRxiv (2024).

Jari Pronold, Aitor Morales-Gregorio, Vahid Rostami, Sacha J. van Albada. Cortical multi-area model with joint excitatory-inhibitory clusters accounts for spiking statistics, inter-area propagation, and variability dynamics bioRxiv (2024).

Education

University of the Basque Country

Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.)
Renewable energy engineering (electrical engineering)

September 2013 - July 2017

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Computational and mathematical engineering

September 2017 - July 2018

University of Cologne

PhD in Computational Neuroscience
Topic: "Characterization and modeling of primate cortical anatomy and activity."
Handed in on 08.2022. Defended on 21.10.2022
Supervised by Prof. Dr. Sacha J. van Albada

October 2022

CV

Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM)

Research intern

November 2017 - April 2018

Forschungszentrum Jülich

Scientific researcher
Computational neuroscience

Since September 2018