Nikolas was born in Athens, Greece, where he studied Applied Mathematics and Physics. He had always been fascinated by the complexity of the human brain, so he decided to shift his focus to Neuroscience. He joined the Neurasmus Master’s program in Neuroscience in Berlin and Bordeaux. During his PhD he worked with Prof. Anton Sirota to investigate the role of breathing in entraining neuronal dynamics and engaged in the large-scale characterization of the oscillatory architecture of memory circuits.

Nikolas is working on the neuromodulation of amygdala circuits during behavior. Using a combination of fiber photometry and large-scale electrophysiological recordings, Nikolas is investigating the role of neuromodulators in coordinating amygdala circuits during behavior.

• Ph.D. in Neuroscience - Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München
• M.Sc. in Neuroscience (Charité, Berlin & Université de Bordeaux II)
• B.Sc, M.Sc in Applied Mathematics and Physics (NTUA)

Mathias has always been fascinated by neuronal networks, leading him to study biology and neuroscience for his BSc and MSc. During his MSc thesis on information transfer in cultured neural networks, he realized how limited our capabilities to interface with neurons were, leading him to design and characterize light-gated proteins for neuronal activity control during his PhD with Ofer Yizhar. Equipped with the extended optogenetic toolbox he returned to study information transfer between distant brain areas in the lab of Andreas Lüthi. First as EMBO and then as Marie Curie Individual fellow. Since 2023, Mathias is leading the research project valence in decision-making as Ambizione fellow.

Aside from his fascination with neuronal networks, Mathias likes tinkering with proteins, light, and electronics to study brain function. He is leading a research project that is examining the role of amygdala activity on cortical processing during value assignment and decision-making. This project specifically looks at the long-range connections between the basolateral amygdala and prefrontal cortex in mice.

• PhD in Neuroscience, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
• MSc in Systemic Neuroscience, LMU Munich, Germany
• BSc in Biology, University of Constance, Germany

Andras has always been interested in the working principles of the nervous system from molecules to brain areas, so he decided to get involved in research as a high school student. While studying medicine at the Semmelweis University in Budapest, he started his undergraduate research in the lab of Tamas Freund in the Institute of Experimental Medicine on the functional anatomy of inhibitory synapses in the hippocampal formation. He continued his PhD studies in the same lab, shifting to the exciting topic of subcortical control of memory formation. He contributed to the description of a disinhibitory circuit involved in the regulation of contextual memory formation, and to the discovery of a formerly unknown neuronal population in the brainstem controlling aversive experience.

He joined the lab of Andreas Lüthi in 2019 as an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow, where he works on a joint project with Zoltan Nusser’s lab in Budapest on the molecular mechanisms of fear memory encoding in the amygdala.

The main project of Andras is to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the plasticity phenotypes and leading to the selection of a sparse population of neurons into the physical trace of a memory in the brain. To decipher these mechanisms, he uses in vivo two-photon microscopy in behaving mice, followed by high-resolution quantitative immunostainings evaluated by fluorescent confocal microscopy.

• Doctor of Medicine, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary
• PhD in Neurosciences, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary

Tobias was born in Alsace, on the French side of the tri-national urban area of Basel. He did his studies in Strasbourg, before joining the Oncology Department at Novartis, as a postgraduate student. He worked in the pharmacology unit, where he performed PK/PD and efficacy studies on tumor models. He then joined the FMI in 2013 as a Research Associate in the lab of Momo Bentires-Alj. His main project was to identify new therapeutic targets in the field of breast cancer, using an in vivo mutagenesis screening tool. He then got the opportunity to join the Neurobiology Department of the FMI in the lab of Andreas Lüthi, where he is working since 2016 as a Lab Manager.

• MSc in Pharmacology, University of Strasbourg
• BSc in Cellular Biology and Physiology, University of Strasbourg