André Longtin is Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa, where he runs the Neurophysics and Nonlinear Dynamics Group. He is also cross-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 (CNDAI). 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, stochastic optimal control, non-equilibrium biological physics, biological and optical machine learning/computing, 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, axon initial segment dynamics and spike back-propagation control, sensory prediction, scene analysis and novelty detection in weakly electric fish, neural processing of music, and physiological thermodynamics (especially in humans). 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.

Il a obtenu son baccalauréat spécialisé et sa maîtrise en physique à l'Université de Montréal, puis son doctorat en physique à l'Université McGill en 1989, sous la codirection de Michael Mackey en physique et physiologie, et de John Milton à l'Institut neurologique de Montréal. Il a ensuite travaillé pendant deux ans comme chercheur postdoctoral à la Division théorique du Laboratoire national de Los Alamos, au Nouveau-Mexique, au sein du groupe de systèmes complexes de Doyne Farmer et au Centre d'études non linéaires. Il a débuté comme professeur adjoint de physique en 1992 à l'Université d'Ottawa, où il est maintenant professeur depuis 2002.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2003, received a senior Research Prize from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2010, the NSERC Canada Brockhouse Prize for Interdisciplinary Research with Len Maler in 2017, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award in 1999, and the Bellman Prize in Mathematical Biosciences in 1990 with John Milton. He is on the editorial board of a number of journals across physics, mathematical biology, theoretical and computational neuroscience, and engineering.

His current main uOttawa collaborators (and members of the CNDAI) are neuroscientists Len Maler, Jean-Claude Béïque, and Katalin Toth (Cellular and Molecular Medicine), Andrew Seely (Thoracic Surgery), Glen Kenny (Human and Environmental Physiology unit), Georg Northoff (Psychiatry, Royal Ottawa Hospital), Bela Joos (Physics), theoretical neuroscientists Jérémie Lefebvre (Biology+Physics) and Richard Naud (Cellular and Molecular Medicine + Physics) and John Lewis (Biology). He also has a number of national and international collaborators.