Olivier Gschwend is a neuroscientist specialized in system neuroscience.

During his PhD, he focused on studying sensory processing by using the mice olfactory system as a model. His research contributed to understand how the interplay between excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the olfactory bulb separates odor representation and drives odor discrimination learning. It bridged a gap between sensory processing and learning.

As an early post-doctoral researcher, he has been interested in understanding how different brains areas interact and contribute to cognitive control. He con tributes to discover that the claustrum, a deep brain structure that projects to a wide variety of sensory and association cortices, controls prefrontal activity to shift attention from a stimulus-reward association to another, only when this association switch from a sensory modality to another (eg: odor to texture and vice et versa), but not within the same sensory modality (odor A to odor B). This sub-cortical structure plays therefore a crucial role in regulating so-called attentional shifts, which are essential features of cognitive flexibility.

He then did a post-doc in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, and was particularly interested in understanding how individuals use different behavioral strategies in different contexts. He leveraged different technologies such in vivo calcium imaging and optogenetics in behaving mice to study how different outputs neurons in the prefrontal cortex enable or prevent the selection of context-guided behavioral strategy. He observed that the prefrontal neurons projecting to the dorso-medial striatum favor a context-dependent switch of behavioral strategy while prefrontal neurons projecting to the ventral midline thalamus tend to keep invariant previously learned strategies and prevent cognitive flexibility,

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