Ali Nourizonoz

Ali Nourizonoz is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Branco Lab, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. At SWC, he studies social escape behaviour in large-scale, complex social environments. He is particularly interested in how social hierarchy, shelter choice and shelter sharing influence rapid survival decisions in freely moving mice, and how the brain combines social and spatial information to guide escape behaviour.

Before joining SWC, Ali completed his PhD in Daniel Huber’s lab at the University of Geneva, where his research combined neuroethology, systems neuroscience and engineering to study natural behaviour in freely moving animals. He developed EthoLoop for real-time behavioural tracking and analysis in naturalistic environments, and BlueBerry for wireless optogenetic manipulation in freely moving animals. He used these closed-loop neuroethology approaches to investigate visually guided arboreal leaping in the gray mouse lemurs, both in the laboratory and in the forests of Madagascar, asking how early primates transform visual information into predictive motor commands for ballistic whole-body movement.