Research Projects

Understanding of the normal and diseased brain crucially depends on reliable knowledge of its microstructure. Important functions are mediated by small cortical units (columns) and even small changes in the microstructure can cause debilitating diseases. So far, this microstructure can only be determined using invasive methods such as, e.g., ex...

Neurodegeneration associated with Parkinson’s (PD) and Alzheimer’s (AD) diseases begins several years prior to the appearance of clinical symptoms and in total, over eight million people in Europe were living with PD or AD in year 2010. Currently, there are no diagnostic tools which allow for early diagnose and/or monitoring the progression these...

Brain disorders impose an increasing economical and social burden in the member states of the European Union (EU). For most neurodegenerative diseases and many neuropsychiatric disorders no efficient treatment is available and no cure exists. In the next coming years the number of particularly elderly people suffering from brain disorders will...

This IRG will support my return to the EU as a Senior Lecturer in Nutrition and Neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, bringing state-of-the-art science and technology, collaborations, and excellent prospects for reintegration and the enhancement of European competitiveness. My research aims to elucidate the metabolic basis of brain...

At present more than 5 million people in the EU suffer from dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases and that number will grow as the average age of the population continues to increase. The efficacy of current medicines is limited and new therapeutic targets are sorely needed. Several independent lines of evidence have established an...

Orientation in space, time, and person is the essence of the behaving self, and the bedrock of neurological and psychiatric mental status examination. States of disorientation may be the hallmark manifestation of several neuropsychiatric disorders. Despite orientation’s central role in health and disease, orientation has almost never been a subject...

The increasing number of elderly people will have a major impact on the prevalence of age-related diseases, which will pose major challenges to keep health systems in Europe sustainable. Current knowledge is insufficient to identify the transition of normal brain ageing into Alzheimer`s Disease (AD)-like brain damage. Elucidation of the genes and...

Future treatment of incurable neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), and Huntington’s disease (HD), has to be tailored to individual patients or cohorts of patients to obtain an optimal effect. The STEMMAD project is aimed to create a highly innovative...

This reintegration project will give to the applicant the opportunity to use the additional insights and expertise that he has gained during his previous MC-IEF to build on his experience for an independent academic career. The aim of this project is to investigate the structure - activity relationship (SAR) of synthesized peptides that selectively...

Inhibitory chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans (CSPGs) have several roles in CNS damage and repair, revealed by their digestion with chondroitinase. Most recently, digestion of CSPGs in the limbic system and cortex has led to a very substantial enhancement of memory. The effects of CSPGs on plasticity and memory are largely through their...

When an adult mammal acquires new skills and new knowledge, the degree to which transition will occur from temporary to permanent memories of such events is governed by factors such as emotional weight and importance of the experiences for survival. To execute the necessary structural synaptic reorganisations needed to permanently embed novel...

The rules linking odor perception to odorant structure are unknown. No scientist nor perfumer can predict an odor based on its molecular structure, or decipher a molecular structure based on its smell. It is this puzzle we aim to solve. In vision and audition coding was probed by linking critical physical stimulus dimensions (wavelength/frequency)...