Jose Luis Perez Velazquez was born in Zaragoza, Spain. He received an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and a PhD in Molecular Physiology & Biophysics. His research attempts at understanding the brain-behaviour relation at a high level of description, seeking principles of biological organisation. He worked as a Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children and was Professor at the University of Toronto, where he taught a graduate course on consciousness and self-awareness derived in part from his book The Brain-Behaviour Continuum. He also edited Coordinated Activity in the Brain (Springer), and has edited special issues for The Journal of Biological Physics, Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience and Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. Currently he is a research scholar at the Ronin Institute, where he continues to investigate a possible global principle, a scheme derived from past research combining theoretical studies and experimental recordings in vitro and in vivo, that conceptualises how consciousness arises from the organization of matter in terms of the maximisation of energy/information exchange given by the largest possible number of configurations of interacting cell ensembles.
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