Van Ooyen was trained as a (theoretical) biologist and received his PhD in computational neuroscience from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1995. After postdoctoral periods at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research in Amsterdam, he started working at VU University Amsterdam in 2004, first as assistant professor and later as associate professor. His long-term interests include the computational and mathematical modeling of neuronal morphogenesis and the development of synaptic connectivity, with a focus on the role of homeostatic structural plasticity in the formation and reorganization of neuronal networks. He is editor of the book Modeling Neural Development (MIT Press, 2003) and author of the review paper Using theoretical models to analyse neural development (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2011).
Markus Butz-Ostendorf, Ph.D.
Markus Butz-Ostendorf studied informatics and biology and holds a PhD in neuroanatomy. He did several postdocs at e.g. at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Göttingen, the Neuroscience Campus VU Universiteit Amsterdam and the Forschungszentrum Jülich. His research focus is on modeling structural plasticity in the healthy and diseased brain. Together with Arjen van Ooyen, he phrased a computational theory on the driving forces for homeostatic structural plasticity following brain lesions. The underlying algorithms are freely available in the modeling framework for large-scale spiking neuronal networks NEST. He recently edited Frontiers Research Topic "Anatomy and plasticity in large-scale neuronal networks."