I was attending the annual meeting of the GAIN network in Boston, MA. In two interesting days I had a lot of useful conversations with people from German universities, funding agencies and politicians. Continue reading “MEETING: GAIN 2018” →

Our new paper “Electric pulse characteristics can enable species recognition in African weakly electric fish species” has been published by Scientific Reports.

This study, mainly carried out by Rebecca Nagel and Ralph Tidemann in Potsdam in In this study looks into how the statistics of electro organ discharge (EOD) behavior in Mormyrid fish might carry information that they would use to recognize conspecific versus heterospecific fish.
Continue reading “PAPER in Scientifc Reports” →

Cycle 2 (Electric Fish & STG) at the Neural systems and behavior course at the MBL in Woods Hole has begun… . See some pictures Continue reading “NEWS: NS&B 2018 @ Woods Hole” →

Brainfacts.org has selected on of my pictures as the “Image of the Week”. Check it out here! The image was originally published alongside my paper in J Neurosci in January 2017.

PNAS Journal just published my study “Motion Parallax in electric sensing”, which is a joint project with Jacob Engelmann and Federico Pedraja (Active Sensing Group) at  Bielefeld University (in Germany) and John Lewis (Comparative Physiology Group) at the University of Ottawa (Canada) on the use of sensory flow for sensing in context of distance estimation.

In this study we provide the first direct experimental evidence for the long discussed hypothesis that weakly electric fish use cues from the spatiotemporal dynamic sensory flow to analyze their surroundings. Continue reading “PAPER in PNAS” →

In late 2014 i traveled to Potsdam where Ralf Tidemann and Rebecca Nagel had invited me to the Evolutionary Biology/ Systematic Zoology Group to give a talk and assist in  setting up a video-recording and EOD playback setup that would allow automated tracking and long time monitoring of electric fish in their lab. Continue reading “PAPER in Royal Soc Open Sci” →

Our new paper “Differential receptive field organizations give rise to nearly identical neural correlations across three parallel sensory maps in weakly electric fish” was just published in PLoS Computational Biology. Although the journal published it alongside the picture of a skate (which has no connection to the article or its content), I am more than happy with the outcome of the paper. We even were on top of the PLoS Comp Biol page for a few days (see screenshot posted above!). In this paper we Continue reading “PAPER in PLoS Comp Bio” →

I presented my current work at the DZG annual meeting. The main meeting and a 2 day neuroethology satellite, were well organized and packed with exciting talks. It was great to get back to Bielefeld where i worked on my dissertation from 2010-2014 and meet so many of my old colleagues and friends!

This June i was teaching at the NS&B (neural systems and behavior course) at the MBL (marine biological lab) in Woods Hole, MA USA. 2 weeks full of science, Continue reading “NEWS: NS&B 2017 @ Woods Hole” →

I was at my first annual meeting of the Canadian association for neuroscience in Montreal and presented my research “Differential receptive field center-surround organization give rise to similar levels of neuronal correlations in three parallel sensory maps in the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus” as a poster. Despite the long title I had vivid discussion with colleagues about my work and would like to thank you all for the good input!