I am a neurobiologist based in Berlin, Germany, where I run a research laboratory, lead a multilab consortium on neural netwotrks, and teach university students at undergraduate and graduate levels.
My lab works on the genetic basis of brain wiring and maintenance. The questions that motivate our work in the lab are indeed the questions laid out in the The Self-Assembling Brain and in my Royal Institution Lecture of the same title from June 8, 2021:
In practice, this leads to a combination of approaches, from genetic manipulations to the live observation of biological neural networks during their self-assembly. To understand how the genome encodes the growth of a brain, we focus on live observation of neurons in the developing brain of the tiny fruit fly at the very moment the neural network self-assembles and becomes a brain. How can a genetic program encode such goings-on? That’s what PhD students and postdocs in my lab are trying to find out using the little fly as a model.
You’ll find more information about the lab, the team, and our publications on the Hiesinger Lab site.
I grew up with my mother, a full-time administrative assistant and single mum, who worked hard to give me the freedom to learn and wonder. The book is dedicated to her memory and to my family, Nevine and Nessim, who continue to support me in more ways than I understand.
Endowed with the privilege to learn and wonder, I first wondered about the natural world and decided to study biology in the early 1990s. Soon, I wondered whether I was really using my brain to study the world, or whether I was just studying the world in my brain. I am still wondering.
After a PhD in neurogenetics from the University of Freiburg in Germany in 2000, I worked as a scientist in US medical schools for almost 15 years. From 2000-2006 I was a postdoctoral researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. I started my independent research lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in 2006, where I was tenured as associate professor in 2012. After more than 14 years in Texas without fast food, without TV, without a gun and without the right to vote, I returned to Germany as a professor of neurobiology at the Freie Universität Berlin – just to find out that I had become a bit of an alien in my own home country. Or is that again just the world in my brain (its algorithmic growth and function, as it is described in The Self-Assembling Brain)?
I wrote The Self-Assembling Brain from 2017-2020, maybe just to find out.
You can email me directly at contact [at] flygen.org