Kevan A.C. Martin was a founding Director of the Institute of Neuroinformatics and a Double Professor of Systems Neurophysiology at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). With Rodney Douglas he proposed the ‘Canonical Circuit Hypothesis’, which provides a framework for understanding the structure and function of local circuits in the neocortex. His experimental research is on the circuits of the neocortex and the computations it performs for perception, cognition and action.