Article

The Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) cordially invites you to attend the talk 

"Neural circuits and behavior in larval zebrafish"

By Florian Engert, Harvard University 

Date: Wed., 13 December 2017, 11.00 a.m.
Venue: IMP Lecture Hall, Campus-Vienna-Biocenter 1, 1030 Vienna

Florian Alois Engert is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and a group leader at Harvard University. His laboratory uses the larval zebrafish as a model system for the comprehensive identification and examination of neural circuits that control visually induced behaviors. The team established and quantified a series of visually induced behaviors and analysed the individual resulting motor components. Using these assays, they established technology that monitors neuronal activity throughout the zebrafish brain in an awake and intact preparation.

An extended goal is the study of how changes or variations in the behavior are reflected in changes in the underlying neuronal activity. To that end, the Engert lab has developed several quantitative learning assays and tools for in vivo monitoring – and controlling – of neural activity in freely swimming larvae.

Florian Engert received his Ph.D. in physics from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich in 1997. He spent the following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Tobias Bonhoeffer at the MPI for Neurobiology in Martinsried, followed by two more years as a postdoc, first at the University of California, San Diego, and then at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2002, he accepted a position as assistant professor at Harvard University, where he received tenure and was promoted to full professor in 2009.

Florian Engert has been invited to the IMP by Manuel Zimmer. Like Manuel, he has been selected twice to lead a project under the “Global Brain” initiative by the US-based Simons Foundation.

Further information on Florian Engert’s research: http://labs.mcb.harvard.edu/Engert/ 

About the Max Birnstiel Lectures

The Max Birnstiel Lectures are a special series of seminars at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna and represent the highest award that the IMP can give to outside scientists. They are named after the founding director of the institute, Max L. Birnstiel, who passed away in 2014. Each year, five to six scientists are invited to deliver one of these lectures, among them a number of Nobel Prize laureates. The Max Birnstiel Lectures attract considerable attention on campus and within the wider scientific community and invariably draw a large audience to the IMP.

Programme of the Max Birnstiel Lectures:
www.imp.ac.at/seminars/max-birnstiel-lecture-series

Videos of past Max Birnstiel Lectures: 
https://www.imp.ac.at/research/lectures-seminars/max-birnstiel-lecture-videos/