Martin Adrianus Vinck

Born: 1983, Netherlands

Martin Adrianus Vinck graduated summa cum laude in 2008 from Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands).

Current Position

• Neurophysics Department, Radboud University Nijmegen
• Donders Centre for Neuroscience
• Head of Department Neurophysics (from 1 January 2026)

Previous Appointments

• Max Planck Society
• Yale University (trained with Jess Cardin and Mike Higley)
• University of Amsterdam (trained with Cyriel Pennartz, Francesco Battaglia, Jadin Jackson)
• Donders Institute for Neuroscience (trained with Francesco Battaglia, Paul Tiesinga, Thilo Womelsdorf, Pascal Fries, Conrado Bosman)

Major Grants & Fellowships

• ERC Starting Grant (2020–2025)
• ERC Consolidator Grant (2025–2030)
• NWO VIDI Career Grant (2023–2028)
• DBI2 Neuroprosthetics Grant (€23M total; Steering Committee member, WP1 leader)
• Multiple DFG Grants
• Multiple BMBF Grants
• Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Fellow
• NWO Toptalent and NWO Rubicon Fellowships

Awards

• Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Young Scientist Award (€10,000 personal prize)
• Scopus / Elsevier Young Scientist Award

Major Scientific Contributions

• Developed widely used analytical measures for quantifying inter-areal brain interactions and directed communication (e.g. Vinck et al., 2010,2011,2012,2015).
• Introduced novel mathematical tools for the unsupervised identification of temporal sequences in high-dimensional neural data, including the SpikeShip framework (Sotomayor et al. et al., 2023a).
• Demonstrated that precise information in visual cortex is encoded by spike timing relative to oscillatory phase (Vinck et al., 2010, PNAS).
• Showed that high-dimensional temporal spike sequences carry substantially more information and exhibit greater stability than traditional spike-count codes (e.g. Sotomayor et al., 2023b).
• Established a novel predictive coding theory with strong empirical support, explaining neural dynamics across cortical areas (Uran et al., 2022, Neuron).
• Discovered a major previously unrecognized cell type in primate primary visual cortex with distinct functional properties (Onorato et al., 2020, Neuron).
• Pioneered pupillometry in rodents as a quantitative tool for brain-state monitoring, dissociating arousal and motor influences on cortical activity (Vinck et al., 2015, Neuron; McGinley et al., 2015).
• Developed a new standard model for gamma oscillations in visual cortex based on interactions between three neuronal populations, integrating experimental and theoretical approaches (Peter et al., 2019, eLife; Uran et al., 2022, Neuron; Onorato et al., 2025; Tahvili et al., 2025).
• Made major conceptual and theoretical contributions to understanding inter-areal communication and predictive processing, proposing new frameworks and validating them experimentally (Schneider et al., 2023; Vinck et al., 2023, Neuron; Vinck et al., 2025, TICS).
• Provided new insights into convolutional neural networks and their relationship to biological neural representations (Farahat & Vinck).
• Advanced understanding of the relationship between structural (anatomical) and functional/effective brain connectivity (Vezoli et al., 2021a,b).
• Derived fundamental synaptic plasticity rules from predictive processing principles, linking learning dynamics to theory (Saponati et al., 2023).
• Established damped harmonic oscillators as a principled base model for neural oscillations and conceived the idea to use these units to effectively train recurrent neural network architectures (Spyropoulos et al., 2022, Nature Communications).
• Advanced circuit-level understanding of attention across cortical layers and cell types using combined experimental and theoretical approaches (Vinck et al., 2013, Neuron; Spyropoulos et al., 2024).
• Demonstrated the synergistic nature of broadband cortical responses using information-geometric approaches (Gelens et al., 2024, Nature Communications; Roberts et al., 2025).
• Discovered “neighbourhood neurons” in perirhinal cortex that segment the spatial environment into compartments and exhibit sustained activity (Bos*, Vinck* et al., 2017, Nature Communications).

Bibliometrics

H-index: 43
Total citations: >9,500
Citations per year: >1,300 (2025)

Research Approaches

• Theoretical neuroscience
• Computational modeling and simulations
• Machine learning and neural network modeling
• Experimental neuroscience: optogenetics, optotagging, high-density multi-area electrophysiology
• Analytical method development for brain data and beyond