NeuroDowo 2014

Welcome to NeuroDoWo 2014!

It is a pleasure to announce the 25th anniversary meeting of the Neurobiology Doctoral Students Workshop (NeuroDoWo) held in Berlin, the place where everything began.

Hosted annually by different German universities and organized entirely by students, the NeuroDoWo is an excellent networking platform for students from different branches of neuroscience. The workshop aims to induce engaging and useful discussions among doctoral students. Projects, ideas and results can be presented in talks or posters. In addition, we are looking forward to welcoming the invited speakers Professor Randolf Menzel and Professor Hans-Joachim Pflüger, two of the founders of the NeuroDoWo, as well as Dr Ulf Toelch and Professor Jan Slaby.

Professor Randolf Menzel (Freie Universität Berlin)
The dynamics of learning and memory during foraging are the main interest of Randolf Menzel. Apis melifera gives him the opportunity to study a relatively simple nerve system. In order to find the underlying neuronal mechanisms of navigation in the environment he is observing the bees in the field but also performs electrophysiological and optophysiological recordings.

Professor Hans-Joachim Pflüger (Freie Universität Berlin)
The biogenic amines octopamine and tyramine are important neurotransmitters in the insect nervous system with both peripheral and central actions. Thus, they organize (“orchestrate”) different aspects of behaviour such as regulating metabolism, generating motor patterns and being involved in processes of learning, into meaningful sequences of events that serve one particular behavioural function. The talk will dwell upon different experiments in the insect nervous system that study these roles at a cellular level.

Dr Ulf Tölch (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
As a postdoctoral researcher in the Ray Dolan lab Ulf Tölch is a member of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. His research focuses on how information from others is used and what is learned from it. Furthermore, he wants to know in what way this information is learned and what implications these findings have for the understanding of cultural evolution. He exercises mainly behavioral studies that are complemented by fMRI data and rigorous modeling.

Professor Jan Slaby (Freie Universität Berlin)
Jan Slaby works in the Institute of Philosophy and in the research cluster Languages of Emotion. His work spans the broad area between the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. His areas of expertise are philosophy of emotion, personhood, theories of mind, phenomenology, critical philosophy of science (particularly of psychiatry and neuroscience). Furthermore, he attempts to elaborate a non-standard perspective in the philosophy of mind and personhood centered on agency and affectivity (enactivism, extended mind, phenomenology); and he works on a critical science studies approach called “critical neuroscience”.