Professor of Physiology
- 1979 Diplom in Physics, University of Göttingen
- 1982 M.D., University of Göttingen
- 1985 Dr. rer. nat., University of Göttingen
- 1987 Dr. med., University of Göttingen
- 1997 Appointed Head of the Department of Molecular Neurophysiology in the Center of Physiology and Pathophysiology, Medical School, University of Göttingen

Major Research Interests
We are trying to understand how the sense of smell works. Olfactory systems are able to detect and distinguish thousands of molecules in our environment. Receptor neurons are endowed with hundreds of different receptor molecules to bind odorants and transduce the chemical signals into electrical ones (Fig. 1). Chemosensory information is thus represented in a rather high-dimensional space. The receptor neurons, which code the hitting probability of odor molecules binding to their molecular receptors (Fig.2), eventually generate trains of action potentials, a one-dimensional vector of stochastic processes. They convey their information onto the brain, in particular the olfactory bulb, where the receptor neuron signals are transformed into a two-dimensional neuronal image of firing activities. Glomerula, small skeins of receptor nerve fibers and synapses in the olfactory bulb (Fig. 3), appear to be the heart of olfactory coding.

Using a combination of electrophysiological techniques, single molecule detection, photochemical and high resolution imaging techniques as well as computational and modeling methods, we are studying the biophysical and physicochemical details of
- the primary coding processes,
- the synaptic transmission in glomerula
- the generation of the neuronal chemotopic map as well as
- the processes and mechanism of odor learning and memory.