Cyriel Marie Antoine Pennartz (born October 7, 1963) is a Dutch neuroscientist serving as professor and head of the Department of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
[4][5] Pennartz’ work uses a multidisciplinary combination of techniques to understand the relationships between distributed neural activity and cognition, including in vivo electrophysiology and optical imaging, animal behavior and computational modelling.
He obtained his PhD degree in Neuroscience cum laude at the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Fernando Lopes da Silva and Henk Groenewegen.
His PhD project and follow-up research examined the physiology and plasticity of brain circuits involved in memory and motivation, focusing on the hippocampus and ventral striatum.
Recently his work has been ramifying into the clinical domain, studying disorders of consciousness and memory, and into neurotechnology, developing new methods to combat consequences of stroke.