Robert Egger, graduate student in the Department of Digital Neuroanatomy, received the Otto-Haxel-Prize of the Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg in Germany. This annual award honors the best student graduating from the Combined Faculties of Physics and Astronomy.

Robert Egger’s award-winning research project was carried out at the MPFI over the last 12 months and focused on the 3D reconstruction of an entire region of the rat brain. “Robert’s results now enable us to reconstruct the neural networks that underlie behavior, such as decision-making, with unprecedented precision”, said Dr. Marcel Oberlaender, supervisor of the project. Robert Egger remains at the MPFI, where he will extend his research to the simulation of sensory-evoked signal flow through parts of the reconstructed rat brain.

About Otto Haxel
Otto Haxel (2 April 1909, in Neu-Ulm – 26 February 1998, in Heidelberg) was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project. After the war, he was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen. From 1950 to 1974, he was an ordinarius professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, where he fostered the use of nuclear physics in environmental physics; this led to the founding of the Institute of Environmental Physics in 1975. During 1956 and 1957, he was a member of the Nuclear Physics Working Group of the German Atomic Energy Commission. From 1970 to 1975, he was the Scientific and Technical Managing Director of the Karlsruhe Research Center. (www.wikipedia.org)

About the Max Planck Florida Institute
The first institute established by Germany’s prestigious Max Planck Society outside of Europe, the Max Planck Florida Institute is also the first research institute of its kind in North America.  MPFI seeks to provide new insight into the functional organization of the nervous system, its capacity to produce perception, thought, language, memory, emotion, and action. Neural circuits, the complex synaptic networks of the brain, hold the key to understanding who we are, why we behave the way we do, and how the debilitating effects of neurological and psychiatric disorders can be ameliorated. MPFI meets this challenge by forging links between different levels of analysis—genetic, molecular, cellular, circuit, and behavioral—and developing new technologies that make cutting edge scientific discoveries possible. For more information, visit www.maxplanckflorida.org.