Jean-Baptiste Masson is a theoretical physicist and principal investigator (PI) in the Decision and Bayesian Computation (DBC) - Epiméthée (EPI) laboratory at the Institut Pasteur. They also belong to INRIA, CNRS and Université Paris Cité. Christian Vestergaard, a theoretical physicist, and François Laurent (FL), an applied mathematician and software engineer, head the Laboratory. He and Christian are members of the Institut pr[ai]rie, and Jean-Baptiste Masson is one of the 5 founders and scientific director of the Institut pasteur spinoff Avatar Médical.
His research interests focus on the organizational principles of biological information processing. More specifically, he looks for these organizing principles in the physics underlying their calculations and in the physics of their sensory environments. To tackle these problems, they have developed advanced models and statistical analysis frameworks that have enabled them to successfully describe bacterial chemotaxis, olfactory search strategies without spatial perception in insects, and synaptic variability in the random walk dynamics of synaptic receptors. Their current research topic is embodied neuroAI.
