Prof. Dr. Tobias Bonhoeffer

Prof. Dr. Tobias Bonhoeffer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence. He was born in Berkeley, California, and received his PhD in Neurobiology in 1988 from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. His scientific research focuses on the cellular basis of learning and memory, as well as on early postnatal brain development. He is among the world's leading researchers in the field of synaptic plasticity in the brain and has developed novel optical methods that allow structural changes in the living brain to be observed as it adapts to its environment.

Professor Bonhoeffer has been a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich since 2002 and has served as Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway since 2014, and as Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa since 2022. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). From 2016 to 2022 he served as a scientific advisor to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in San Francisco, USA, and from 2014 to 2021 he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Wellcome Trust. In 2004, he was awarded the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine.