Helene Schmidt, PhD

I’m heading an independent research group at the Ernst Struengmann Institute (ESI) in Frankfurt am Main, funded by the Otto Hahn award of the Max Planck Society .

My lab will study the entorhinal – hippocampal neuronal network using 3D electron microscopy.

After studies of cognitive science and computational neuroscience in Osnabrück and Berlin, a bachelor thesis at Caltech with Christof Koch, I did my Master thesis and PhD with Michael Brecht at the Humboldt University of Berlin studying the networks underlying spatial navigation. Together with the Connectomics department at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, we were able to contribute to a mechanistic description of the synaptic architecture in the rat medial entorhinal cortex (Schmidt et al., Nature 2017). For this work I received the Humboldt Dissertation Award (2018), the Otto Hahn Medal 2019 and the Otto Hahn award 2019. After a brief post-doc at the MPI for Brain Research I started my own group at ESI in November 2020.