Sean Lewis Hill is an American neuroscientist, Professor at the

University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine The Temerty Faculty of Medicine (previously Faculty of Medicine) is the medical school of the University of Toronto. Founded in 1843, the faculty is based at the St. George campus in Downtown Toronto and is one of Canada's oldest institutions ...

, and co-founder and CEO of Senscience, an AI startup dedicated to transforming science with open data.Senscience website
/ref> He was previously the Inaugural Scientific Director of the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics
Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics website in

Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

. Until December 2024, he also served as co-director of the

Blue Brain Project The Blue Brain Project was a Swiss brain research initiative that aimed to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain Mind Institute of ''École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne'' (EPFL ...

at the

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (, EPFL) is a public university, public research university in Lausanne, Switzerland, founded in 1969 with the mission to "train talented engineers in Switzerland". Like its sister institution E ...

located on the Campus Biotech in

Geneva Geneva ( , ; ) ; ; . is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland and the most populous in French-speaking Romandy. Situated in the southwest of the country, where the Rhône exits Lake Geneva, it is the ca ...

Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...

."Scientists Trying To Replicate The Human Brain"
''Sky News'', 20 June 2014 Hill is known for the development of large-scale computational models of brain circuitry, neuroinformatics, and innovation in AI for mental health.
''Bloomberg'', By Sam Chambers 2014-06-27"Scientists to simulate human brain inside a supercomputer"
''CNN'', By Barry Neild, October 12, 2012

Early life and education

Hill was born in

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

, raised in

Warren, Maine Warren is a town in Knox County, Maine, United States. The population was 4,865 at the 2020 census. It includes the villages of East Warren, Warren and South Warren, the latter home to the Maine State Prison and minimum security Bolduc Correc ...

, and attended Camden-Rockport High School. He graduated from

Hampshire College Hampshire College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was opened in 1970 as an experiment in alternative education, in association with four other colleges ...

with a degree in Computational Neuroscience and obtained his PhD from the

University of Lausanne The University of Lausanne (UNIL; ) in Lausanne, Switzerland, was founded in 1537 as a school of Protestant theology, before being made a university in 1890. The university is the second-oldest in Switzerland, and one of the oldest universities ...

Career

After working with Nobel prize winner

Gerald Edelman Gerald Maurice Edelman (; July 1, 1929 – May 17, 2014) was an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research conc ...

and

Giulio Tononi Giulio Tononi () is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine, as well as a Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is best known for his Integrated In ...

The Neurosciences Institute The Neurosciences Institute (NSI) was a small, nonprofit scientific research organization that investigated basic issues in neuroscience. Active mainly between 1981 and 2012, NSI sponsored theoretical, computational, and experimental work on cons ...

in San Diego, Hill continued his postdoctoral research at the

University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...

. In 2006, Hill joined the Computational Biology group at the

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. Its main laboratory is in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City. It also operates facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Albany, ...

as Project Manager for Computational Neuroscience on the Blue Brain Project from 2006 to 2008. He subsequently joined the EPFL Blue Brain team. Hill served as the executive director of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility from 2011 to 2013 and as its Scientific Director from 2013 to 2016. He developed the core strategy and design of the neuroinformatics infrastructure of the EU Human Brain Project, led its development during its start-up phase, and in 2014 was co-director of the project. In September 2017, Hill was named the inaugural Director of the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics at the

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH, pronounced , ) is a psychiatric teaching hospital located in Toronto and ten community locations throughout the province of Ontario, Canada. It reports being the largest research facility in Can ...

in Toronto, Canada. The center applies machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, as well as multi-scale modeling of the brain to understand mental health disorders. One initiative established under his tenure is the BrainHealth Databank, a data-driven learning health system integrating AI and computational models with mental health clinics. Hill’s work at KCNI involved addressing questions about mental illnesses such as depression. He emphasizes the need for a multi-level biological understanding of mental illness and advocates for a collaborative, data-sharing approach to neuroscience. Prior to this, Hill served as co-director of Blue Brain, where he led the Neuroinformatics Division. In this role, he pioneered the use of knowledge graphs for organizing neuroscience data, and directed the development of Blue Brain Nexus, an open-source data integration, management, and search platform adopted by both the

and

Human Brain Project The Human Brain Project (HBP) was a €1-billion EU scientific research project that ran for ten years from 2013 to 2023. Using high-performance exascale supercomputers it built infrastructure that allowed researchers to advance knowledge in ...

. Hill has developed several large-scale computational brain models and simulations, including the first large-scale model of the visual thalamocortical system of the cat, which accurately replicates multi-scale electrophysiological phenomena during wakefulness and sleep. He has also co-led Blue Brain's efforts to create digital reconstructions of neocortical and thalamic microcircuitry. He is on the advisory or management boards of several clinical and neuroinformatics initiatives, including the Ontario Brain Institute, Brain Health Nexus, and others. In 2022, Hill led a team at the

to develop the Canadian Youth Mental Health Insight Platform, aimed at addressing longstanding gaps in youth mental health care. In 2024, Hill co-led an initiative to establish a pan-Canadian data federation for youth mental health. Hill is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, holds multiple patents, and has given talks worldwide on neuroinformatics, mental health, brain modeling and simulation, and the cellular and synaptic mechanisms of conscious and unconscious brain states. An advocate of global collaboration on data sharing in brain research, Hill has worked with brain projects worldwide to identify potential areas of collaboration and interaction. He has been quoted as saying, "It takes the world to understand the brain." Hill has appeared in the press and in documentaries about the brain, including on ARTE and the PBS documentary

The Brain with David Eagleman ''The Brain with David Eagleman'' is a PBS documentary series created and presented by neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman. Eagleman explores the wonders of the human brain with the goal of revealing why we feel and think the things we do. The ser ...

, and has been interviewed in print and on radio and television programs including the CBC, CNN, and Bloomberg.

Early life and education

Career

References

External links