Tobias Bonhoeffer

Tobias Bonhoeffer is the director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. He was born in Berkeley California and received his PhD in Neurobiology from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in 1988.

His scientific research is focused on the cellular foundations of learning and memory, as well as on the early postnatal development of the brain. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on synaptic plasticity in the brain and has pioneered new optical methods of observing the structural changes in the living brain as it adapts to its environment.

Dr. Bonhoeffer is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Academia Europaea, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and is on the Board of Governors of the Wellcome Trust. He was awarded the 2004 Ernst-Jung Prize for Medicine.