Neuroinformatics Software Engineering

Christian O'Reilly is a post doc in the Software Engineering Section of the Neuroinformatics Division.

Christian’s focus is on developing a biophysically detailed model of the thalamo-cortical loop at the microscopic (i.e., neuronal) level, with a particular interest in emerging oscillatory phenomena such as sleep spindles.

Before joining Blue Brain, Christian was an NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) postdoctoral fellow at McGill's Brain Imaging Center (Montreal, Canada) where he worked in collaboration with UCL's Functional Imaging Laboratory (London, UK) to develop a biophysically motivated mesoscale model of the thalamocortical loop to study sleep MEG and EEG transients using Karl Friston’s Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) approach. He further applied his expertise in high-density EEG source imaging to study autism in infants during a 6-month internship at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute (McGill, Montreal, Canada). Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine (Université de Montréal & Hôpital Sacré-Coeur, Canada) where he developed novel techniques for investigating EEG signals during sleep, with a particular interest in sleep spindles.

Christian received his B.Ing. in electrical engineering, M.Sc.A. in biomedical engineering and his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada.

A keen participant of yoga, Christian also runs and paints in his spare time.

Selected Publications

O’Reilly, C., Godin, I., Montplaisir, J. & Nielsen, T. (2015) REM sleep behaviour disorder is associated with lower fast and higher slow sleep spindle densities, Journal of Sleep Research, 24(6), 593-601.

O’Reilly, C. & Nielsen, T. (2015) Automatic sleep spindle detection: Benchmarking with fine temporal resolution using open science tools, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9(353), 1-19.

O’Reilly, C., Gosselin, N., Carrier, J. & Nielsen, T. (2014) Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies: An open-access resource for instrument benchmarking & exploratory research. Journal of Sleep Research, 23(6), 628–635.

O'Reilly, C. & Nielsen, T. (2014) Assessing EEG sleep spindle propagation. Part 1: Theory and proposed methodology, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 221, 202-214.

O'Reilly, C. & Nielsen, T. (2014) Assessing EEG sleep spindle propagation. Part 2: Experimental characterization, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 221, 215-227.