Insights into the Brain - How Genetics Controls Brain Development.

Simon Hippenmeyer
The human brain is one of, or probably the most fascinating achievements of nature. During brain development, billions of neurons are formed and linked into complex networks, in a precisely timed and ordered process. If errors happen in the formation or maturation of the brain, this has dramatic consequences, and can seriously impair brain function. Many brain development disorders and psychiatric diseases are often based on errors in the genetic material. How these errors and genetic deficits specifically affect development and brain function is not well understood. Therefore, the holistic understanding of virtually all psychiatric diseases is still very incomplete. Research based on natural science and basic science. with high cellular and physiological resolution, however, offers very good and promising approaches to better understand the biological developmental processes of the healthy and also the diseased brain.

Simon Hippenmeyer, Molecular biologist, geneticist and neurobiologist. Professor of Developmental Neurobiology and Life Sciences Research Area Chair, researches and teaches at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA).
For outstanding and excellent research in the field of single cell genetics, which Prof. Hippenmeyer also developed at Stanford University in the USA, he was honored, among others, with the ERC grant.