Bio

My research aim is to understand how cortical circuits enable us to learn from sensory experiences by predicting them.

Since May 2025, I am an adjunct professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zürich, Switzerland.

Previously, I did two postdocs, one with Walter Senn at the Institute of Physiology in Bern and one with Claudia Clopath at Imperial College London, UK. The latter was funded by a research fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). During that time, I was also a visiting researcher with Blake Richards at Mila Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Montreal, Canada.

I did my PhD with Susanne Schreiber and Henning Sprekeler at the Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University of Berlin and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. I received a PhD fellowship from the DFG within the graduate school GRK 1589 “Sensory Computation in Neural Systems”. Prior to that, I studied Cognitive Science (BSc) at Osnabrück University, and Brain and Cognitive Sciences (MSc) at the University of Amsterdam.

I used to be the postdoc representative of the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience and can highly recommend the annual conference. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in Computational Neuroscience, check out my alumni portrait (scroll down on the website).

Qualifications / Education:

2016 PHD | COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE/BIOPHYSICS Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Germany.

Thesis: (Dis-)inhibitory gating of excitatory synaptic plasticity: a cellular modeling approach

2011 MSC | BRAIN AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES: COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2009 BSC | COGNITIVE SCIENCE Osnabrück University, Germany

2008 Study Abroad | School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK

Academic positions:

05/2020 – present Advanced Postdoc, Department of Physiology | Universität Bern, Switzerland

2017-2020 Research Associate / Postdoc with Prof. Claudia Clopath, Imperial College London, UK

2019 Visiting Researcher with Prof. Blake Richards, Mila Quebec AI Institute, Montreal, Canada

2011-2017 PhD student with Prof. Susanne Schreiber and Prof. Henning Sprekeler, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

2011 MSc student with Prof. Klaus Obermeyer, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

2010 MSc lab rotation student with Prof. Mike X. Cohen, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2010 MSc lab rotation student with Prof. Francesco P. Battaglia and Prof. Cyriel Pennartz, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands