Our Lab

The current CortXplorer working group members

Prof. Max Happel

Group Leader

Max studied biology in Frankfurt am Main & neurobiology in Magdeburg. He received his PhD in systems physiology at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology (LIN) in Magdeburg in 2011 with Prof. Frank Ohl. He was then a postdoc at the University of Oxford with Prof. Andrew King. Afterwards, he established his research group CortXplorer at LIN Magdeburg. The research of the team focuses on the functional neurophysiology of decision-making, learning and memory with an emphasis on cortical microcircuit processing. Since 2021, Max is also professor at the Medical School Berlin. 
Max transfers his passion for learning in the context of teacher training & school concept development with a focus on digital learning, personal development and self-organized learning.

Katrina Deane

PhD Candidate

Katrina Deane has been working o n her PhD project since the end of 2018 on population dynamics in the auditory cortex during voltage gated calcium channel clustering and the subsequent shift of stochastic to deterministic firing behavior in pyramidal neurons. She completed her Master’s with us in 2018 on a project exploring differences between anesthetized and awake naive Mongolian gerbils’ auditory cortices in response to pure tones. Her BSc was completed in Michigan Tech University in the field of Psychology. 
Katrina has been involved in several Long Night of Science outreach events and is currently a PhD Representative in our institute. She is a hobby painter of neurons and player of table top RPGs.

Ebru Acun

PhD Candidate

Ebru Acun completed her Master’s with the chair of bionanotechnology of Prof. Dr. Aldrik Velders in Medical Biotechnology at Wageningen University, where she also did her BSc thesis in the biophysics lab of Dr. Johannes Hohlbein. During her Master’s, she went to Switzerland to do her MSc internship at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in the research group of Prof. Dr. Andreas Hierlemann, where Ebru was exposed to in-vitro neuroscience and electrophysiology studies. Afterwards, she decided to pursue a PhD within the field of neuroscience and joined our lab in September 2020 to study the regulation of the extracellular matrix by dopamine during adult learning. Her project is in collaboration with the research group of Dr. Renato Frischknecht within the department of Animal Physiology/ Neurobiology at FAU Erlangen. On the side, Ebru works as an artist and uses mixed media and recently also fibers.

PARTHIBAN SARAVANAKUMAR

PhD Candidate

Parthiban completed a Bachelor's in Biotechnology at the Rajalakshmi Engineering College of Anna University in Chennai, India. He then came of Magdeburg to study his Master's degree in Integrative Neuroscience with a thesis on exploratory attentional resource allocation in probabilistic foraging in our lab. He is continuing with us now as a PhD candidate researching prefrontal cortical recruitment of attentional resource allocation during foraging behavior. 

Our Alums

The previous CortXplorer working group members

Dr. Hartmut Niekisch

Postdoctoral Researcher

Technical University Kaiserslautern

PhD Alum

Dr. Michael Brunk

Neuroscience Lab Coordinator

Max-Planck-Institut für Mikrostrukturphysik, Halle

PhD Alum

Dr. Marina Zempeltzi

Strategic Research Manager

Fraunhofer Institute IFF, Magdeburg

PhD Alum

Ruslan Klymentiev

Research Assistant Alum

SABINA NOWAKOWSKA

Master's Alum

Sümeyra Aksit

Master's Alum

Francesca Abela

Master's Alum

Martin Kisse

Research Assistant Alum

Claudia Glemser

Research Assistant Alum

Mohamed el Tabbal

Master's Alum

Erika Kaschinski

Bachelor's Alum

Ivan Bykov

Master's Alum

Ruslan Klymentiev

Research Assistant Alum

SABINA NOWAKOWSKA

Master's Alum
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