I am Vanessa Leite, Ph.D. Candidate at Institute of Neuroinformatics, UZH/ETHz. I have a Master's degree in Computer Graphics from PUC-Rio, Brazil (2012). After my master's, I worked for four years in a software development institute.

In October 2016 I joined Matthew Cook’s Cortical Computation Group, working on a 3D reconstruction of neurons from electron microscopy images.
And in October 2018 I joined the Neuromorphic Cognitive Systems group, where I am carrying on my Ph.D. project supervised by Giacomo Indiveri.

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My Ph.D. project focus on facilitating the emulation of Spiking Neural Networks onto Neuromorphic Hardware. I'm always happy talking about my project and explaining what our goal is.

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My participation in fighting for gender equality dates back to 2006 when I joined the Computer Science Central Students Directorate. There we used to explain feminism, gender bias, and harassment to all the students.

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In 2019, already in Zurich, I became a member of the “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee from the Neuroscience Center (EIC - ZNZ), where I'm carrying my Ph.D.

 

In 2019 I joined the 500WS Zurich Pod, and in 2020 I became part of the coordination team.