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 Group leader "Neurophysics Lab" at the Campus Institute for Dynamics of biological networks



Major Research Interests


    My research covers various fields of neuroscience and ion channel biophysics. In my BCCN group Biophysics of neural encoding we focus on those key properties of neuronal systems that determine performance of information encoding. This can be the resupply of vesicles at a synapse (Holt et al. 2004, Neef et al. 2007) or the speed of action potential initiation. My goal is then to obtain a quantitative understanding of the system performance, which includes precision measurements of biopyhsical properties, structure, and function of neuronal elements. Sometimes it also requires the development of new experimental or numerical methods (e.g. Neef et al. 2007, Agudelo-Toro and Neef 2014, Yang et al. 2015). In collaboration with colleagues and friends I address problems from single molecule diffusion to non-invasive brain stimulation (e.g. Weiß et al. 2013, Rotem et al. 2014).




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


Selected Recent Publications


  • 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