André Longtin is Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa, where he runs the Neurophysics and Nonlinear Dynamics Group. He is also appointed to the Neuroscience program in the Faculty of Medicine. In 2004, he co-founded and now co-directs the uOttawa Centre for Neural Dynamics and AI. His main interests lie at the interface of nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics, biology and medicine. His group develops theory for sensory processing and memory, the effect of noise and delays in nonlinear and neuronal systems, nonlinear time series analysis, optimal control and non-equilibrium and physiological thermodynamics. He collaborates closely with systems neuroscientists as well as clinicians in brain-related specialties.  

These days (2025) he enjoys modeling work on hippocampus (mammals) and pallium (zebrafish), aimed at understanding computations such as path learning, sequence learning, and pattern separation and completion. He also works on epilepsy in hippocampus, multiple sclerosis and myelin plasticity, peripheral and central thermal and pain coding, axonal initial segment and spike back-propagation, sensory prediction, scene analysis in weakly electric fish, and physiological thermodynamics. Related projects in physics concern autonomous and driven stochastic rhythms, entropy production in feedback control systems, reservoir computing with delayed loops, adaptive dynamics and associated phase transitions, and ultra-sensitive signal detection.

He received his honors bachelors and masters in Physics from Université de Montréal, and his Ph.D. in Physics from McGill University in 1989 under the co-supervision of Michael Mackey in physics and physiology, and John Milton at the Montreal Neurological Institute. He then worked for two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, in Doyne Farmer’s Complex Systems group and the Centre for Nonlinear Studies. He began as assistant professor of Physics in 1992 at the University of Ottawa, where he is now Professor since 2002. 

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2003, received the senior Research Prize from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2010, and the NSERC Canada Brockhouse Prize for Interdisciplinary Research with Len Maler in 2017. He is on the editorial board of a number of journals across physics, mathematical biology, theoretical and computational neuroscience and engineering.