… and welcome to our new lab website!

This blog is curated by our PI Tobias Donner, and all members of our lab contribute.

Our lab has just moved from the UvA in Amsterdam to the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) in Hamburg. This move is due to a DFG Heisenberg Professorship award to Tobias Donner. We now form the Decision Neuroscience group of the Dept of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology.

Our lab has also changed, and grown substantially, in the last year. While Niels Kloosterman obtained his PhD and moved on to a postdoc position at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, we have been joined by (in chronological order) Anke Braun, Niklas Wilming, Bharath Chandra Talluri, Peter Murphy, Chris Gahnström — and Tom Pfeffer, who has been associated with the lab since 2013, officially moved over to our lab. We are now waiting for Konstantinos Testsos to join us on a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship in April.

Our lab during one of our ping pong exercises in early 2015 at UvA...
Our lab during one of our ping pong exercises in early 2015 at UvA…
... and our lab during our first joint dinner after the move to Hamburg, with Kostis visiting.
… and our lab during our first joint dinner after the move to Hamburg, with Kostis visiting.

We are excited about these new developments. In 2016, we aim to capitalize on our new position within a medical center to move deep into neural circuit mechanisms of decision-making, by systematically combining selective pharmacological interventions with non-invasive neurophysiology/-imaging and quantitative behavioral modelling. Several studies are running in parallel, with different pharmacological interventions that target various different cortical circuit components and neuromodulatory systems — all within the same decision-making tasks, or at “rest”. We also plan exciting new collaborations with animal physiologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists, to probe these circuits at smaller scales in animal preparations, and in disturbances of the central nervous system.

We will remain closely aligned with UvA, where we have a number of great collaborators (e.g., Simon van Gaal, Cyriel Pennartz, Pieter Roelfsema, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers). Some of our lab members will proudly keep up our UvA base (in particular Olympia Colizoli and Thomas Meindertsma, occasionally joined by Anne Urai and Jan Willem de Gee.) And we are very much looking forward to running our first experiments on the new 7T MRI system at the Spinoza Centre in Amsterdam.

Happy new year…
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