Gero Miesenböck

Gero Miesenböck ( born July 15, 1965 in Braunau am Inn) is an Austrian neurophysiologist. He is considered one of the pioneers of the scientific research field of optogenetics.

Life

Miesenböck studied at the University of Innsbruck medicine. It was 1991 Sub auspiciis Praesidentis rei publicae with the dissertation Relationship of triglycerides and high-density lipoprotein metabolism doctorate. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked from 1992 to 1998 with James Rothman, Memorial Sloan -Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

In 1999 he received first professors ( assistant professor ) of Cell Biology and Genetics and of Neuroscience at Cornell University in New York City, but remained a member or director of the Laboratory for Neural Systems at Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center. 2004 Miesenböck went as an Associate Professor of Cell Biology and of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

In 2007, Miesenböck a professorship at the University of Oxford, where he (as of 2013) is Waynflete Professor of Physiology today. In 2011 he became a founding director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour.

Work

From 1999 Miesenböck developed partly in collaboration with Boris V. Zemelman basic techniques of optogenetics that help neurons can be selectively activated by light.

Miesenböck deals with neural excitation circles, he studied mainly on the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. Here he searches for the elementary excitation circuits that implement operations such as information integration over time, use of thresholds in decision making, error signals or information storage. Opto -genetic techniques allow the process with high accuracy to enable certain groups of neurons that are responsible for certain behavior, and to identify and test hypotheses about their functioning excitation circuits of neurons.

Awards (selection)

• 2008: Elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization
• 2009: Bayliss -Starling Prize Lecture
• 2012: Inbev Baillet Latour Health Prize, International
• 2013: Brain Prize
• 2013: Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine