While arguably being the most complex—albeit paradoxically, the most unknown—organ of the human body, the brain remains the topic of intense research efforts. The last few years have embraced multidisciplinarity as a sine qua non condition for any successful endeavour, but current research still falls short of delivering many of the promises that the major international programmes of the last 10 years had made.

In this presentation, I will argue that multidisciplinarity is not enough and that a shift of paradigm is needed in which the brain must be considered as a coupled multiphysics system that consists of multiple physical processes occurring concurrently and collaboratively, as opposed to sequentially and independently. This presentation will then cover an illustrative set of projects working within this assumption mainly from the computational lens, and in particular in the context of brain pathologies, such as trauma, and ultrasound neuromodulation.

Antoine Jerusalem is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford. After graduating from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (Toulouse, France) with an Engineering Diploma in Aeronautics and Space and from MIT (Boston, MA, USA) with a Masters in 2004, he obtained his PhD from MIT in 2007. After a short postdoc, he then led the Computational Mechanics of Materials Group in IMDEA (Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies) Materials until 2008, after which he joined the University of Oxford.

Antoine Jerusalem's research work is at the interface of computational mechanics and materials multiphysics, with the brain as the main focus and a particular interest in brain trauma and ultrasound neuromodulation.