Julijana Gjorgjieva has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant

Research Group Leader Julijana Gjorgjieva at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research has received this prestigious grant for the NeuroDevo project. She is one of the 19 laureates currently working at the Max Planck Society. In addition, three of them, including Julijana, are in the MaxPlanck@TUM program, reflecting the success of the dual Max Planck and TU Munich track. 

As part of her project, which is titled "Spontaneous and sensory-evoked activity shape neural circuits in the developing brain, Julijana Gjorgjieva will use a combination of data analysis, theory and modeling to investigate how neural circuits are built and organized during early postnatal development, and how they are modified by intact and perturbed sensory activity. In order to do this, she will use quantitative analysis of longitudinal recordings of single neuron and network activity by synthesizing data from three collaborating labs.

The project aims to reveal novel aspects of this activity that drive circuit refinement over a prolonged timescale during development, and identify the powerful ways in which activity and circuit properties influence each other. The developed models will also generate and test novel hypotheses for how individual components affect different aspects of circuit organization during development.

We congratulate Julijana on this tremendous effort!