Speakers

	Fiona Doetsch
	Fiona Doetsch joined the Biozentrum as professor of Molecular Stem Cell Biology in 2014. Her research aims to decode the diversity of stem cell populations in the adult brain and to elucidate how physiological conditions modulate the maturation and behavior of neural stem cells. These immature nerve cells have the unique ability to self-renew and to develop into the different cell types of the nervous system. In the adult brain, neural stem cells reside in specialized niches and continuously give rise to new neurons throughout life. Unraveling how various signals affect neural stem cell behavior provides new insights into brain repair and disease. Fiona Doetsch is an internationally renowned expert in the field of neural stem cells. The Canadian-born scientist studied biochemistry, and history and philosophy of science at McGill University in Montreal and obtained her PhD in Neurobiology from the Rockefeller University in New York. Prior to her appointment to the Biozentrum, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and an assistant professor and then associate professor at Columbia University, USA.
	Theofanis Karayannis
	Theofanis Karayannis is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director of the Brain Research Institute. He studied Pharmacy at the University of Athens, Greece and carried out his D.Phil. thesis on cortical interneurons at the MRC Anatomical Neuropharmacology Unit of the University of Oxford, UK. As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Gord Fishell at New York University Medical Center, USA, he worked on the synaptic integration of interneurons in the developing cortical circuit and on neurodevelopmental disorders. He is a recipient of a NARSAD award and an ERC Starting Grant
	Marlen Knobloch
	Marlen Knobloch has obtained her PhD at the University of Zurich in the Group of Prof. Nitsch, where she developed and characterized a novel mouse model for Alzheimer’s disease. During her PhD, she furthermore contributed to an innovative immunization approach against Alzheimer’s disease, which is currently in a clinical phase 3 trial led by Biogen. Dr. Knobloch moved on to do her postdoc in the Group of Prof. Jessberger at the University of Zurich, where she has been studying the metabolic requirements of adult neural stem cells. Her work has uncovered important novel mechanisms how lipid metabolism controls neural stem cell activity. She has further been a guest postdoc at EPFL in the Group of Prof. Luetolf. In 2017, Dr. Knobloch has obtained an assistant professorship in the Department of Physiology at the University of Lausanne where she has established the Laboratory of Stem Cell Metabolism.
	Gioele La Manno
	Gioele earned his PhD at Karolinska Instituet in Linnarsson Lab. His research focuses on understanding brain development. He is particularly interested in describing the sequence of states that embryonic stem cells go through during their differentiation towards mature neurons. He is tackling this question using machine learning tools on the wealth of data provided by single cell RNA sequencing, a technique he has been working with and developing since its early times.
	Christian Mayer
	Christian Mayer is a native of Germany and first became interested in how intrinsic and extrinsic processes cooperate to establish the adult form of brain connectivity and behaviour control as an undergraduate at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Dr. Mayer received his PhD from the University of Hamburg, Germany, where his thesis work at the ZMNH on the neuronal mechanisms of pubertal maturation was awarded the Gebhard Koch PhD prize for biochemistry and neurobiology. As an EMBO Long-Term Fellow at the NYU Neuroscience Institute, USA, Dr. Mayer pioneered the use of single cell RNA sequencing to study how developmental gene expression results in the generation of cortical interneuron diversity. In 2018 Dr. Mayer moved to Munich, Germany, to start his independent laboratory at the Max Planck Institut of Neurobiology. His lab combines lineage tracing methods, genetics, physiology and computational methods to understand how different interneuron types emerge during development and integrate into functional circuits. Dr. Mayer recently received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council.
	Thomas McWilliams
	Tom has an eclectic research background. He graduated with a 1st Class Honours degree in Biochemistry from the National University of Ireland, Galway (ranked 1st in Class). Subsequently, he undertook doctoral research on the Wellcome Trust Four-Year PhD Programme in Integrative Neuroscience at Cardiff University, UK. He completed his PhD studies in developmental neurobiology under the guidance of Prof. Alun M. Davies FMedSci FRS, co-supervised by Prof. Stephen B. Dunnett FMedSci. Following a short post-doctoral period in the Davies Lab, Tom was recruited by Dario R. Alessi FMedSci FRS to the MRC Protein Phosphorylation & Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Here, he worked with Ian Ganley, PhD and Miratul M. K. Muqit FRCP on selective autophagy and mitochondrial signalling in vivo, with a principal focus on Parkinson's disease. His unexpected discoveries in both mitophagy and degeneration signalling sparked a drive to unravel their mechanistic interplay in mammalian development and disease. Tom launched his independent laboratory in 2018 at the University of Helsinki. He is a Principal Investigator at the Faculty of Medicine, and a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Mitochondrial Medicine. The McWilliams laboratory is adjunct member of FinMIT: an established Centre of Excellence for Finnish metabolism and mitochondrial research. In 2018, he was named Academy of Finland Research Fellow and awarded the prestigious Novo Nordisk Foundation Excellence Project in Endocrinology & Metabolism.
	Marco Prinz
	Mr. Marco Prinz serves as the Director of the Institute of Neuropathology at the University Hospital Freiburg, Germany. He graduated as a M.D. from the Medical School Charité of Humboldt University, Berlin. Subsequently, he joined the Molecular Neuroscience Laboratory of H.Kettenmann at the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) for Molecular Medicine in Berlin-Buch and started first work on microglia. After this period he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Neuropathology led by A.Aguzzi at the University Hospital Zurich, Medical School, Switzerland. Shortly after, he moved to Göttingen, Germany to continue his research on the brains immune system and became a lecturer and consultant in neuropathology. In 2008 he was appointed as Director of the Institute of Neuropathology at the University Hospital Freiburg, Germany. His current research focuses on the brain specific immune functions during health and disease (autoimmune and neurodegenerative CNS disorders) and the fate of microglia in the brain. His group investigates the role of type I interferons such as IFN-alpha/beta for autoimmune inflammation (Prinz et al. Immunity 2008; Dann et al. Nat Neurosci 2011). Furthermore, the origin and function if microglia are of special interest for his research team (Goldmann et al. Nat Neurosci, 2013, Kierdorf et al. Nat Neurosci, 2013, Mildner et al. Nat Neurosci 2007, Prinz et al. Nat Neurosci 2011).
	Carlos Ribeiro
	Nutrition is a key determinant of health, wellbeing and aging. We want to understand how animals decide what to eat and how these decisions affect the fitness of the animal. To achieve a mechanistic, integrated, whole-animal understanding of nutritional decision-making we work at the interface of behavior, microbiome, metabolism and physiology in the adult fruitfly. The powerful neurogenetic tools available in model organisms allow us to identify molecular as well as circuit mechanisms involved in producing the appropriate behavioral response to a specific need of the fly. We also dedicate a significant effort to the development of novel, automated and quantitative behavioral assays to understand the behavioral strategies used by the fly to make the right nutritional decisions. The combination of powerful molecular circuit manipulations, sophisticated behavioral analyses, and imaging approaches allows for a mechanistic understanding of how neuronal circuits control nutritional decisions to regulate important traits such as aging and reproduction.
	Bosiljka Tasic
	Bosiljka Tasic joined the Allen Institute in 2011 as one of the founding members of the Mouse Cell Types program to establish methods for studying cell-type specific neuronal connectivity. She currently leads an effort toward comprehensive molecular analysis of neuronal identity in the mouse visual system. Before joining the Allen Institute, Bosiljka completed her postdoctoral training with Liqun Luo at Stanford University, where she developed molecular genetic techniques for labeling and manipulation of specific neuronal populations or single neurons in Drosophila and mice, and a new method for site-specific transgenesis in mice. Bosiljka received a Bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the University of Belgrade (once Yugoslavia, now Serbia), and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology with Tom Maniatis at Harvard University, where she studied mechanisms of vertebrate-specific protocadherin gene expression in the nervous system and their role in neuronal identity.

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