Dr. Jacques Carolan is a founding Programme Director at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and Honorary Associate Professor at University College London (UCL). He is an applied physicist by training, having spent 10 years developing photonic technologies to accelerate quantum and classical computing, initially at MIT and then at the Niels Bohr Institute. He then pivoted into systems neuroscience, where he developed optical technologies for high-speed, large-scale interrogation of neural circuits in vivo at UCL. At ARIA he leads a programme developing next-generation neural interfaces to help understand and repair the human brain. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 2015. He has been awarded a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship, a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Global Fellowship and attended the 66th Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting on behalf of the Royal Society.