Invited Guest Speakers

Claudia received her Ph.D. degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Rome, “Tor Vergata”. Following postdoctoral positions in France, Germany, and the United States, she established her own laboratory in Rome (“Tor Vergata”) and later also in KU Leuven. In 2016, Claudia was appointed director of the DNF where her group continues to work on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of synaptopathies.

Grae and his lab have pioneered the rapidly growing field of homeostatic plasticity. Using powerful forward genetics screens they have discovered cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for the homeostatic stabilization of synaptic transmission. Recently, they have discovered some of the first mechanisms responsible for the homeostatic control of neuronal firing rate. Grae has served as the Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Dan Feldman received his Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Stanford University. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). His laboratory was at UCSD from 2000-2007. He has been at UC Berkeley since 2007.

Julijana is a computational neuroscientist studying the emergence of organization and computation in neural circuits during postnatal development and evolution. She is interested in the interaction of single neuron properties and synaptic plasticity to appropriately wire circuits at the cellular and sub-cellular levels during development, and the homeostatic mechanisms that recover neuronal function after perturbation. She works closely with experimentalists to constrain her models and to test modeling predictions in different model organisms from mouse to fly. She obtained her PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in 2011, and did postdocs at Harvard University and Brandeis University in the US, supported by grants from the Swartz Foundation and the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. In 2016, she set up an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and joined TUM as an assistant professor shortly after as part of the MaxPlanck@TUM program.