Brain Research: ERC Starting Grant for Neuroscientist from Basel

Since January 2018 Jan Gründemann holds a professorship funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) at the Department of Biomedicine. In his ERC research project, he investigates how structural-plastic changes in nerve cells contribute to perception and learning processes.  He studied human biology in Marburg, Germany, and obtained his PhD in Neuroscience from University College London in 2011. Gründemann subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow and Ambizione Fellow of the SNSF at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel.

Neural processing in deep brain areas

Our senses are constantly bombarded with a multitude of sensory impressions. It is unclear how and where in the brain these stimuli are filtered, integrated and processed from the environment. Gründemann and his team use modern microscopy methods to understand the neuronal coding of multisensory integration and associative learning in deeper brain regions, with a focus on associative fear learning and evidence-based decision-making.

His ERC research project “Deep brain imaging of cellular mechanisms of sensory processing and learning” aims to identify the cellular processes that are subject to experience- and learning-dependent changes at the neural network level. A special focus is on the in vivo analysis of cellular plasticity in the entry and exit pathways of nerve cells.