Team

Frederike got her first introduction to Neuroscience in the lab of Steffen Katzner and Laura Busse (in Tübingen, Germany at the time), working with mice and visual behavior. This experience sparked her interest and motivated her to move to the lab of Pascal Fries for a PhD. Here she was one of two students to establish the common marmoset as an animal model for the lab and did some additional research involving rats. In the NNCC Lab Frederike is studying the circuit between prefrontal cortex and the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and its role in action selection.

Gabriel is a Chilean biologist and trained violinist who graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He completed his PhD in 2024 at the University of Sydney, focusing on the role of the Locus Coeruleus in large-scale dynamics. His research examines the role of neuromodulatory systems across human and animal models in both healthy and neurodegenerative conditions.

PhD student interested in cognitive control and decision making. Curious about life in general and how cells form a thinking and feeling individual.

Dmitrii is a senior PhD student. Psychologist and mathematician by training, he joined the lab in 2014 as an undergraduate assistant. His project is focused around neural correlates of cognitive control and changes of mind. An engineer in spirit, he contributed to development of the head-fixation paradigm in our lab, as well as flexible electrode implantation technique.

Joana is a doctoral researcher working on understanding the neural circuit for metacognitive control over visceral-emotional responses in rats. She got her Bachelor's in Biology in the Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto and her Master's in Neuroscience in the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki. In her work she combines electrophysiology, behavior, and autonomic measures to further comprehend brain-body connection in the context of metacognition. Joana's interests outside of work include drawing, painting, and playing tennis.

Amelien is a doctoral researcher studying locus coeruleus (LC) population activity and its role in cognition and behavior. She got her bachelor's in biology at the University of Hasselt and her master's in neuroscience at the University of Antwerp. She currently focuses on the development of ultra-flexible, ultra-thin (1µm) multi-electrode probes for deep brainstem recordings and studying the differential effect of atomoxetine on LC sub-population activity, their respective projection targets, and corresponding behavior.