Jacques Carolan

About

Biography

I am an applied physicist and neuroscientist developing next-generation neurotechnologies to help understand and ultimately repair the human brain. I think a lot about how we can get frontier treatments to the people who need them most. I am currently a founding Programme Director at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency and an Honorary Associate Professor at University College London (UCL).

I spent the first decade of my career working in applied physics, where I was developing photonic technologies to accelerate quantum and classical computing, initially at MIT and later at the Niels Bohr Institute. I then pivoted into circuit neuroscience at UCL, where I developed optical techniques using optogenetics and high-speed two-photon voltage imaging to study the awake, behaving brain.

Portrait of Jacques Carolan

I completed my PhD at the University of Bristol. I have been awarded a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship and attended the 66th Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting on behalf of the Royal Society.

Experience

  • 2023–present — Founding Programme Director, ARIA. I lead the Precision Neurotechnologies and Massively Scalable Neurotechnologies programmes, working with around 30 teams across a £120M research portfolio.
  • 2021–2024 — Senior Research Fellow, UCL. I worked with Michael Häusser in the Neural Computation Laboratory on circuit neuroscience, combining optogenetics with high-speed two-photon voltage imaging to study synaptic plasticity in the awake brain. This work was supported by a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship.
  • 2016–2020 — Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT. I worked with Dirk Englund in the Quantum Photonics Laboratory on integrated photonics, optical computing and quantum information. My Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship also included research at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen on quantum-dot photonics.

Education

  • 2012–2015 — PhD in Physics, University of Bristol. Thesis: Universal Linear Optics: Characterisation, Verification and Computation. Advised by Jeremy O’Brien.

Things I enjoy doing

When I’m not doing science you can find me bikepacking, climbing up rocks (indoors and occasionally outdoors), and performing improv comedy. The front-page artwork is inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Copied Lines and generated with a small Python tool I made.