Topic: coordination

Investigate how cultural grooming behaviour relates to communication, coordination and social bonds in great apes in Zoë Goldsborough’s group. The project combines existing video records, wild fieldwork and quantitative behavioural analysis, including the grooming handclasp. The fully funded 3.5-year doctorate is a full-time position paid at 65% of TVöD E13, with a planned start between January and March 2027.

Coordination between excitatory and inhibitory synapses (providing positive and negative signals respectively) is required to ensure proper information processing in the brain. Many brain disorders, especially neurodevelopental disorders, are rooted in a specific disturbance of this coordination. In my research group we use a combination of two-photon microscopy and electrophisiology to examine how inhibitory synapses are fromed and how this formation is coordinated with nearby excitatroy synapses.

In the past decade evidence has accumulated in favor of the hypothesis that multiple sub-networks in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) are characterized by low-dimensional, continuous attractor dynamics. Much has been learned about the joint activity of grid cells within a module (a module consists of grid cells that share a common grid spacing), but little is known about the interactions between them. Under typical conditions of spatial exploration in which sensory cues are abundant, all grid-cells in the MEC represent the animal’s position in space and their joint activity lies on a two-dim