Ecole Normale Supérieure

Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), is an internationally renowned institution of higher education. It covers a broad spectrum of topics, from humanities and social sciences, to hard sciences; and promotes interdisciplinary approaches. ENS maintains a competitive selection process, welcoming the best students at the MSc level. Most of our students gain a PhD. Former students include all eight French winners of the Fields Medal, twelve Nobel Prize winners and half of the recipients the CNRS Gold Medal. ENS also hosts some of the most highly active laboratories in France. A staff of 200 foreign lecturers and post-doc researchers maintain the scientific and pedagogic life of the ENS. There are 350 administrative and technical staff who works in ENS’s Departments, laboratories, central services and libraries. Within its Departments, the ENS includes 40 research units identified as ENS, Inserm or Inria, encompassing ENS and CNRS agents as well as 300 foreign researchers and 650 doctoral students.

The Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC, https://cognition.ens.fr/en) is an interdisciplinary department of Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), at the crossroads of the humanities and social sciences, life sciences, and engineering.  Training and research at DEC focus on mental abilities such as perception, attention, decision making, consciousness, reasoning, language, emotions, action, and social skills. Linking these abilities to their underlying psychological mechanisms and their genetic and neuronal bases is the goal of cognitive science. The DEC is running an innovative doctoral program in cognition “Frontiers in Cognition” that serves as an inspiration for iBrain.

The Group for Neural Theory (GNT) was founded in 2005 as part of the Départment Etudes Cognitives (DEC) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. It has been affiliated with affiliated with the INSERM Unité 960 (Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives). The GNT recently became an inter-laboratory team in the Department of Cognitive Studies (DEC) at ENS with over 10 faculty members. The main research goal is to understand the basis of cognitive processing in the brain by identifying links between neural dynamics, neural function and cognitive abilities of the human psyche.

Web-page: www.ens.fr