Alexandre Pouget, full professor in the Department of Basic Neurosciences and member of the Synapsy Centre for Neuroscience Research in Mental Health at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, is the laureate of the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience awarded by the Society for Neuroscience, the leading learned society bringing together scientists and physicians specialising in the brain and nervous system. An expert in computational neuroscience, he uses probabilistic theories, computation and learning in neural circuits to decipher the mechanisms of the brain in many fields, such as spatial representations, sensorimotor transformations, multisensory integration, attention control and decision-making.

Alexandre Pouget's work has had a considerable impact on theoretical and experimental neuroscience aimed at understanding perception, decision-making and reasoning. According to his approach, brain knowledge takes the form of probability distributions and learning is acquired through probabilistic inferences. He was one of the first to make specific predictions about how Bayesian inference might be implemented in the brain, arguing that brain functions can be understood and described in the language of probability theory and showing how neurons calculate these probabilities.

Winner of the 2016 Carnegie Prize, he also co-founded the Computational and Systems Neuroscience Meeting (COSYNE) and co-created the International Brain Laboratory. He is currently focusing his research on the neural basis of compositional thinking. A cornerstone of general intelligence, this principle hypothesises that the meaning of a complex expression is defined by the meanings of the expressions that compose it and by the rules used to combine them. He heads the Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Laboratory at the Faculty of Medicine. 

The Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience is awarded to an individual whose activities have made a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience, or who has recently made particularly remarkable advances in the field of theoretical or computational neuroscience.