Tobias Bonhoeffer

Tobias Bonhoeffer ( born January 9, 1960 in Berkeley, California ) is a German neurobiologist. He is Director of the Department synapses - Circuits - plasticity at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. His father is the neurobiologist Friedrich Bonhoeffer, who was a director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen.

Life and work

Bonhoeffer studied physics at the University of Tübingen. At the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, he was awarded his doctorate. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked at the Rockefeller University (USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main. Then he led an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, before he was appointed Director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in 1998. Tobias Bonhoeffer was between 2008 and 2011 Section Chair of the Biology and Medicine Section of the Max Planck Society.

In mid-2008 he was nominated for the founding president of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria ( IST Austria ) in Gugging near Vienna, which would be a central institution for basic research and postgraduate institution in 2009. Bonhoeffer's final order should be placed with the fall of 2008. Bonhoeffer was announced on 21 July 2008, for personal reasons offered to the management of the IS to renounce.

Tobias Bonhoeffer's work deals with the cellular basis of learning and memory as well as the early postnatal development of the brain.

Tobias Bonhoeffer made ​​a number of important discoveries. Among other things, he succeeded

Honors and Memberships

Tobias Bonhoeffer was awarded the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine among others in 2004. Since 2009 he is member of the European Molecular Biology Organization ( EMBO), since 2010 Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.