Rate My Professor Stephen Eglen

Professor Stephen Eglen is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Mathematics, at the University of Cambridge. He obtained his DPhil in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex in 1997 and a Joint Honours degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Psychology from the University of Nottingham in 1993. His career trajectory includes a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in Mathematical Biology at the University of Edinburgh from 1997 to 2000, followed by a Lectureship in the School of Informatics there from 2000 to 2001. He then held a Wellcome Trust Travelling Fellowship from 2001 to 2004, working between Washington University in St Louis and Edinburgh. Joining DAMTP in 2004 as Lecturer, he advanced to Senior Lecturer from 2006 to 2015, Reader from 2015, and Professor. Eglen is a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and co-directs the MPhil in Computational Biology. He is affiliated with the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute and Cambridge Neuroscience.

Eglen's research applies computational methods to study neural development, particularly in the retina and visual pathway. He investigates structural development, such as how retinal neurons acquire positional information and form mosaics and retinotopic maps, and functional development, including synaptic connectivity mechanisms. His work also involves analyzing large-scale neurophysiological datasets from multi-electrode arrays and calcium imaging. Key publications include 'Detecting pairwise correlations in spike trains: an objective comparison of methods and application to the study of retinal waves' (2001), 'A data repository and analysis framework for spontaneous neural activity recordings in developing retina' (2014), 'Canalization of genetic and pharmacological perturbations in developing primary neuronal activity patterns' (2016), 'Quantitative assessment of computational models for retinotopic map formation' (2015), and 'Homophilic wiring principles underpin neuronal network topology in vitro' (2025). Eglen co-founded Codecheck to promote computational reproducibility and advocates for open access, data sharing, and rights retention in research. He has been appointed a Turing Fellow by the Alan Turing Institute.