Vanessa Stempel selected 2026 FENS-Kavli Scholar
The FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence (FKNE) has announced its new cohort of 15 FENS-Kavli Scholars for 2026. The programme recognizes outstanding early-career neuroscience researchers in Europe for their scientific excellence, originality, and leadership. Among those selected is Vanessa Stempel, independent Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt.
The multidisciplinary, international network of FENS-Kavli Scholars is self-organized and aims to improve neuroscience in Europe and beyond through scientific exchange, advocacy, and outreach. FKNE Scholars regularly participate in meetings to exchange ideas on neuroscience and collaborate on initiatives ranging from science policy and public engagement to activities that strengthen the European neuroscience community.
Neural circuits underlying instinctive behaviours
Vanessa Stempel's group investigates how circuits in the rodent brainstem circuits instinctive behaviours. Their research focuses on the midbrain periaqueductal gray, a brain region that can initiate diverse survival behaviours, including escaping threats, hunting of crickets, and pup retrieval. By combining ex vivo microcircuit analyses with neural activity recordings in freely behaving mice, the group studies how synaptic, cellular, and circuit mechanisms enable the flexible execution of these instinctive behaviours and whether different neuronal populations can perform similar functions across behavioural contexts. In addition, her group explores how internal state changes, particularly across the reproductive cycle, alter neuronal and synaptic properties and drive behavioural adaptations.
About Vanessa Stempel
Vanessa completed her undergraduate studies in Biology in Germany and Poland before moving to the UK for an MSc by Research at UCL, where she developed an interest in neuroscience. She then joined the group of Dietmar Schmitz at the Charité Berlin for her PhD on cellular and synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, completed in 2015. She did her postdoctoral fellowship in Tiago Branco's group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and later at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (UCL), supported by the German Research Foundation. In 2019, she received the UCL Early Career Neuroscience Prize for uncovering a synaptic mechanism underlying instinctive escape decisions.
Since 2021, Vanessa has been an independent Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2024 and is a member of a European COST Action advancing Sex As A Biological Variable in biomedical research.
About the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence
Founded in 2014 by the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) and The Kavli Foundation, the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence (FKNE) recognizes outstanding early-career neuroscience researchers in Europe for their scientific excellence, originality, and leadership. The multidisciplinary network promotes scientific exchange, collaboration, advocacy, and outreach, bringing together emerging leaders in neuroscience to advance research and strengthen the European neuroscience community. Scholars serve two consecutive two-year terms before joining the FKNE Alumni network.
