Abigail Morrison

Prof. Abigail Morrison is a Professor and Group Leader of the Computation in Neural Circuits group at the Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6), part of Forschungszentrum Jülich. Her work focuses on advancing neuromorphic computing, reservoir computing, and spiking neural network simulations. She leads development of the NEST simulator and NESTML modeling language, tools critical for large-scale brain modeling.

Key research areas include:

• Neuromorphic hardware-software co-design
• Biophysically plausible neural network models
• GPU-accelerated simulation frameworks
• Multi-scale brain co-simulation techniques
• Applications in embodied AI and neuroscience

Her lab contributes to the European EBRAINS infrastructure and has pioneered methods for parallel GPU-based network construction. Recent work explores topographic neural circuit architectures for signal processing and reinforcement learning in neuromorphic systems.

Notable achievements include:

• Development of NESTML (v8.0+)
• ODE-toolbox for ODE solver selection
• Co-design of HNC neuromorphic compute nodes
• Advances in dendritic computation modeling

Current efforts emphasize exascale computing readiness, neuromorphic system validation, and bridging biological plausibility with computational efficiency in neural network simulations.