Pieter R. Roelfsema received his MD degree in 1991. He did his PhD project with Wolf Singer at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and he received his PhD degree in 1995. In 2002, he started to work at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam where he became director in 2007. He is professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and also Professor at the AMC in Amsterdam. He received a NWO-VICI award (2008) and an ERC-Advanced grant (2013). Roelfsema studies visual perception, plasticity and memory in the visual system of experimental animals, humans, and with neural networks. His main question is how neurons in different brain areas work together during thinking. Even the simplest task activates thousands of neurons across a large number of cortical and subcortical brain areas. Roelfsema studies how these networks of neurons work together to solve the task and how they configure themselves during learning. He uses knowledge about the visual system to create a visual prosthesis for blind people that will restore a rudimentary form of sight.