Michael Brecht

I grew up in Muenster, Germany and started to study biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen. I soon became interested in animal behavior and did a one-year internship at Hubbs Sea World Research Institute, San Diego on sperm whale bioacoustics. Thus, I decided to finish in biology rather than in biochemistry. My diploma work with Bruno Preilowski and Michael Merzenich at University of California San Francisco was concerned with rat vibrissal behaviors. Subsequently I did a PhD in the lab of Wolf Singer on the role synchronization of neural activity in the superior colliculus in the control of eye movements. After my PhD I felt that we will not succeed in understanding population activity without an improved knowledge about cellular computations in vivo. I therefore joined Bert Sakmann’s lab as a postdoc to do in vivo whole-cell recordings in rat barrel cortex. From there I went first to Erasmus University, Rotterdam to become an assistant professor and then to Humboldt University, Berlin, where I became a full professor.