Nicolas Rouleau is a neuroscientist, bioengineer, and Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University. Dr. Rouleau earned his PhD in Biomolecular Sciences in Michael Persinger’s Neuroscience Research Group at Laurentian University, where he studied the material-like properties of human cortical cytoarchitectures and their interactions with electromagnetic signals. He joined the Allen Discovery Center in 2017 as a Postdoctoral Researcher and founding member of David Kaplan’s Initiative for Neural Science, Disease & Engineering (INSciDE) at Tufts, focusing on minimal cognitive responses in bioengineered brain models. As a Principal Investigator and leader of the Rouleau Lab, Nic is developing 3D in vitro models of Alzheimer’s Disease, traumatic brain injury, and other neurological disorders. Dr. Rouleau is also investigating the mechanisms of embodied cognition and synthetic biological intelligences in customizable, bioengineered neural tissues. His collaborations with Dr. Michael Levin center on the fundamental and scale-invariant properties of cognitive systems as well as the pursuit of unifying principles that reconcile organic neural function with analogous phenomena in cells, inorganic materials, and non-neural organisms.
