Owald lab
David Owald - PI
- David wants to understand what goes on in one’s brain. For the moment he thinks his own and those of his friends are slightly beyond his reach so he studies fruit flies. He has identified crucial circuit elements of learning and memory and has participated in drawing up a circuit model at single cell resolution on how encoded information can actually steer a behaviour. He also is very keen to understand synapses and what goes on at these sites at a nanoscopic level.
Eric Reynolds - PostDoc
- Eric started his lab life working with zebra fish at NYU. He studied Medical Neurosciences in Berlin and completed a PhD thesis on synaptic physiology in Drosophila at the Freie Universität Berlin. He’s particularly interested in understanding structural changes in the mushroom body circuitry following learning.
Yi-chun Chen - PostDoc
- Yi-chun worked on synaptic proteins and learning and memory in larval Drosophila at the University of Würzburg and the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg. Her focus revolves around understanding synaptic ultrastructure during learning in the mushroom body.
Anatoli Ender - PostDoc
- Anatoli did her doctoral work at the Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases on presynaptic protein heterogeneity. She’s currently studying the pacemaker function of neurons in the adult Drosophila brain using in vivo patch-clamp recordings.
Sridhar Jagannathan - PostDoc
- Sri started his life studying the brains of humans, however he found them to be too complex and intractable. This made him switch to fruit flies during his PhD in Cambridge. Recently, he moved to Berlin with a Walter Benjamin fellowship to study the function of sleep and it's relationship with learning and memory.
Raquel Suárez-Grimalt - PhD student (Einstein fellow)
- Raquel joined our lab as a PhD student after her work on working memory potentiation in rats in the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Driven by her interest in understanding behavior and memory, she is currently studying the effects of cocaine on learning and the circuitry underlying slow-wave oscillations and sleep drive regulation in flies.
Marcel Heim - PhD student
- Marcel wrote his Bachelor's thesis at the University of Kassel investigating the correlation of locomotion of cockroaches and the neuronal characteristics of their circadian pacemaker center. He then continued with studies of biology at the FU Berlin and worked on his Master's thesis at Charité with us. He is especially interested in signal integration of dopaminergic cells within the mushroom body circuitry.
Tania Fernández del Valle Alquicira - PhD student
- Tania finished her Bachelor’s in Biology at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin and wrote her thesis at the cognitive neurobiology institute on the effects of central serotonin deregulation on decision-making. She is currently a PhD student at the HU Berlin and pursues to focus on behavior and cognition. She is interested in the mechanisms involved in memory and decision-making processes.
Carlotta Pribbenow - MD/PhD student
- Carlotta participated in national and international competitions for young scientist like “Jugend Forscht” and was trained as a biological technical assistant. Now she is a medical student at Charité and is currently doing her MD/PhD on principles of cholinergic single cell plasticity in vivo.
Carolin Rauch - Technician
- Caro joined the lab from the Max-Planck-Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. She worked there in the parasitology department on experimental genetics in the model rodent malaria system to study the roles of parasite and host genes in Plasmodium life cycle progression. She is now focussing on investigating the molecular underpinnings of synaptic rearrangements.
Silas Reubold - undergraduate student
- Silas is a biology student at the Freie Universität Berlin - and neurobiology got his attention. Now he is working with us to investigate presynaptical plasticity of Kenyon cells during learning processes. He is looking into protein modulation throughout olfactory conditioning.
Lara Dreide - undergraduate student
- Lara is a student at the FU Berlin, where she is studying biology. She is mainly interested in genetics and evolution and mostly enjoys working in the laboratory. For her Bachelor's thesis she studied DNA methylation differences in immune genes in cheetahs at the IZW Berlin.
Beke Neumann - undergraduate student
- Beke is a second year medical student at Charité whose current work revolves around understanding the underlying mechanisms of addiction and decision-making. She joined our lab after developing an interest in neurophysiological research in a junior studies programme in Biopsychology.
Marine Balcou
- After completing her bachelor’s degree of cellular biology and physiology, Marine entered the Neurasmus master’s program to study neurosciences. She first worked on computational methods to study human neuron cultures in Amsterdam. Now in Berlin, she is investigating memory consolidation in the fruit fly. Her goal is to help bridge the gap between cellular circuit and behavior.
Lara Press - undergraduate student
- Lara is a third year medical student at Charité and a first year Mathematics Student at TU Berlin. She has been fascinated by neuroscience for a long time and is currently looking into network activity during memory consolidation and sleep.
Raccuglia Lab
Davide Raccuglia - PI
- During his PhD at the Saarland University, Davide worked on the interplay between excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitter inputs during olfactory learning in the honey bee. At the Yale School of medicine, Davide was part of the team that pioneered the use of genetically encoded voltage sensors in intact neural circuits. Combining this technique with optogenetics and behavior, he currently sets out to identify the fundamental electrophysiological principles that underly the creation of sensory gates for sleep regulation.
Cédric Brodersen - MD student
- Cédric is a 5th year medical student at Charité. Due to his strong interest in neurophysiology, he joined the lab as a doctoral candidate. He is investigating the neuronal structures and mechanisms that underly sleep regulation and sensory processing.
Johannes Wibroe - PhD student
- Johannes joined the lab after working in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology. He researches sleep regulation at a cellular level using optogenetics, and has a keen interest in sensory gating, sleep disorders and translational psychiatry.