Lecturer

Email: john.s.butler@tudublin.ie

Tel: +353 1 220 5690

John Butler has been a member of the School of Mathematics & Statistics since 2015. His previous positions were at the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering (2013-2015), the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (2009-2013) and the Max Planck for Biological Cybernetics (2006-2009). John did his BA, MSc in High Performance Computing and PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics in the School of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin.

Teaching is one of John’s great passions and he has amassed a great deal of national and international experience designing and teaching graduate, undergraduate, secondary and primary courses in mathematics, statistics and computational methods to mathematics students and students from other disciplines.

John’s research uses his background in mathematics and biomedical research to design biologically plausible simulations and models derived from human behavioural and neurophysiological data to gain a greater understanding of how the brain processes signals, such as the neural development of a statistically optimal combination of multiple sensory sources like visual and auditory information. These models will help bridge the gap between theoretical hypothesis and experimental data which is vital to further our understanding of normal and abnormal sensory processing. A list of his ongoing projects can be found on his website and publications on orcid.

John is a member of Neuromatch which has the goal of giving students and researchers from all backgrounds equal access to education and networking opportunities, and providing everybody an equal voice in scientific contribution. John has contributed teaching materials to the online interactive summer schools in Computational Neuroscience and Deep Learning. He is also an organiser of the annual Computational Neuroscience Conference and he is particularly proud of the introduction of Neuromatch for Kids which was to show how maths and neuroscience work together the session was in six different languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Hebrew, Spanish).

John has been involved with a number of different science communication events; MathsWeek and Science Week, Pint of Science, Bright Club, I’m a Mathematician Get Me Out of Here, and he regularly gives talks in primary and secondary schools about his work. He has also recently begun writing blogs about using comedy and music in teaching and research.