Walter Senn studied Mathematics, Physics, and Russian at the University of Bern, with a Master in Mathematics (1990) and a PhD in differential geometry and calculus of variation (1993). He studied dynamical systems at Lomonosov University in Moscow (1989), and he acquired a degree as high school teacher from the University of Zurich. In the Neural Network group at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at University of Bern he was engaged in industry projects related to pattern recognition (1994-1997). After a postdoc in Neural Computation at Hebrew University, Jerusalem (I. Segev) and research stays at the National Institute of Health (USA) and the Center for Neural Sciences, New York University (J. Rinzel), he joined the Department of Physiology at the Medical Faculty of the University of Bern (1999). Since 2006, he is full professor of Computational Neuroscience and co-director in the same Department. During a sabbatical (2017) he was visiting MILA (Y. Bengio) at University of Montreal and the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University (S. Fusi and L. Abbott), New York.
Using mathematical models of synapses and neurons, he investigates how cognitive phenomena such as perception, learning, and memories emerge from neuronal structures, and how they relate to artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing. Since 1999 he teaches medical students at the University of Bern on the central nervous system.
He was Co-Editor-in-Chief of Biological Cybernetics (2006-2017), member of the scientific executive board of SystemsX.ch (2009-2016), member of the SNSF Research Commission of the University of Bern (2014-2022), and since 2021 advisory board member of the Center of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (CAIM) at University of Bern. He is advisory board member of the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (2023-) and founding president of the Swiss Computational Neuroscience Association (2025).
