Göttinger Graduiertenzentrum für Neurowissenschaften, Biophysik und Molekulare Biowissenschaften

Neef, Andreas, Dr.


    Head of Neurophysics Laboratory at the Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks
  • 1994-2000 undergraduate and graduate in Physics, University of Jena, Germany
  • 1997-2000 research and graduate student at the Max-Planck research group "Molecular and Cellular Biophysics", Jena
  • 2000 Diploma in Physics, University of Jena, Germany
  • 2000 Visiting scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge, Great Britain
  • 2001-2004 PhD student at the institute for biological information processing in the research centre Jülich
  • 2004 PhD in Biochemistry (Dr.rer.nat), University Cologne
  • 2004-2005 Postdoctoral fellow at the research centre Juelich
  • 2005-2006 Postdoctoral fellow at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN), Göttingen
  • 2006-2013 Bernstein fellow at the BCCN and BFNT Göttingen
  • 2013-2019 Group leader "Biophysics of neural computation" at the BCCN Göttingen
  • since 2019 Head of Neurophysics Laboratory at the Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks



Major Research Interests


    My research covers various fields of neuroscience and ion channel biophysics. The laboratory Neurophysics is a bridge between physics and neuroscience. We use theoretical models and precision measurements of biophysical properties to understand how molecular and cellular properties determine performance of information encoding in neurons and networks. Such key properties can reside in synapses (Holt et al. 2004, Neef et al. 2007) or the axon initial segment (Lazarov et al. 2018, Revah et al. 2019). Sometimes, we develop new experimental or theoretical tools to enable discoveries (e.g. Neef et al. 2007, Agudelo-Toro and Neef 2014, Yang et al. 2015, Zhang et al. 2024). In collaboration with colleagues and friends I also venture beyond the interface of biophysics and neuroscience and apply precise measurements and theoretical analysis to understand single molecule diffusion, human brain stimulation or gender bias in scientific publishing (Weiß et al. 2013, Rotem et al. 2014, Helmer et al. 2017). Most recently, my interest moved to the evolution of neural systems and we began to study the nervous system of various animals from ctenophores and octopus to primates.




Homepage Department/Research Group
https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/653379.html


Selected Recent Publications


  • Zhang C, Revah O, Wolf F, Neef A 2024. Dynamic gain decomposition reveals functional effects of dendrites, ion channels and input statistics in population coding. J Neurosci. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0799-23.2023

  • Abdelaziz R, Tomczak AP, Neef A, Pardo LA. 2023. Revealing a hidden conducting state by manipulating the intracellular domains in KV10.1 exposes the coupling between two gating mechanisms. eLife 12. doi:10.7554/eLife.91420.1

  • Gutnick T, Neef A, Cherninskyi A, Ziadi-Künzli F, Di Cosmo A, Lipp H-P, Kuba MJ. 2023. Recording electrical activity from the brain of behaving octopus. Current Biology 33:1171-1178.e4. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.006

  • Helmer M, Schottdorf M, Neef A, Battaglia D. 2017. Gender bias in scholarly peer review. eLife Sciences 6:e21718. doi:10.7554/eLife.21718

  • Lazarov E, Dannemeyer M, Feulner B, Enderlein J, Gutnick MJ, Wolf F, Neef A (2018) An axon initial segment is required for temporal precision in action potential encoding by neuronal populations. Science Advances 4:eaau8621

  • Keppeler D, Merino RM, Morena DL de la, Bali B, Huet AT, Gehrt A, Wrobel C, Subramanian S, Dombrowski T, Wolf F, Rankovic V, Neef A, Moser T (2018) Ultrafast optogenetic stimulation of the auditory pathway by targeting‐optimized Chronos. The EMBO Journal 37:e99649

  • Helmer M, Schottdorf M, Neef A, Battaglia D (2017) Gender bias in scholarly peer review. eLife Sciences 6, e21718

  • Yang Y, Ramamurthy B, Neef A, Xu-Friedman MA (2016) Low Somatic Sodium Conductance Enhances Action Potential Precision in Time-Coding Auditory Neurons. J Neurosci. 36: 11999-12009

  • Stern S, Agudelo-Toro A, Rotem A, Moses E, Neef A (2015) Chronaxie Measurements in Patterned Neuronal Cultures from Rat Hippocampus. PLoS ONE. 10: e0132577