How does the brain work? How is sensory information processed to guide behavior successfully? Which computational tricks are applied by the nervous system to perform optimally?

Such questions drive me scientifically. In the first place I am electrophysiologist, that is, I record the electrical activity of nerve cells and investigate what the neuronal response tells about the stimulus. In this respect I focus on the processing of sensory information. 

We study the processing of electrosensory information in the weakly electric fish. These fish are an extraordinarily successful and important model system in neuroethology since it is possible to study neuronal activity in the context of its behavior. Much is known about the anatomy and the properties of the involved neurons. Nevertheless, many open questions remain...

Next to the scientific work I am an "open science" and "open data" aficionado. Since several years I collaborate with colleagues of the German Neuroinformatics Node (G-Node) located in Munich in the development of data models and software solutions facilitating automated and complete data annotation which is the basis for effective data sharing.

• Course on weakly electric fish
• Introduction to scientific computing and statistics
• Practical course on animal physiology
• Practical course "Grosspraktikum" of the neurobiology master's programme

• Organiser of the G-Node "Course on Neural Data Analysis" (2017, 2015, 2014)
• Faculty member in the G-Node "Course on Neural Data Analysis" (2013, 2011)
• Teaching assistant in the "Neural Systems and Behavior" summer school at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, MA, USA (2014, 2012, 2011)
• Mentor in the Google Summer of Code programme (2017, 2016)

• 1996 - 2002: Studies of Biology, University of Bielefeld
• 2002 - 2007: Dissertation: Reliability of Neural Coding on Different Stages of Visual Information Processing in an Insect Brain, University of Bielefeld
• 2008 - 2013: Post-doc: Dep. Biology II, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich
• 2013 - present: Senior scientific employee Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen.

• Alexandra Barayeu, Ramona Schäfer, Jan Grewe, Jan Benda (2023) Beat encoding at mistuned octaves within single electrosensory neurons iScience
• Tim C. Hladnik and Jan Grewe (2023)
  Receptive field sizes and neuronal encoding bandwidth are constrained ba axonal conduction delays.PLoS Computational Biology
• Jan Grewe (2020)
  Peripheral High-Frequency Electrosensory Systems. In: Fritzsch, B. (Ed.) and Bleckmann, H. (Volume Editor), The Senses: A Comprehensive Reference, vol. 7 Elsevier, Academic Press, pp. 298-313
• Fabian H. Sinz, Carolin Sachgau, Jörg Henninger, Jan Benda and Jan Grewe (2020)
  Simultaneous spike-time locking to mutiple frequencies.
  J. Neurophysiol. url
• Julia Sprenger, Lyuba Zehl, Jana Pick, Michael Sonntag, Jan Grewe, Thomas Wachtler, Sonja Grün, Michael Denker (2019)
  odMLtables: A user-friendly approach for managing metadata of neurophysiological experiments.
  Front. Neuroinform. url
• Jörg Henninger, Rüdiger Krahe, Frank Kirschbaum, Jan Grewe, Jan Benda (2018)
  Statistics of natural communication signals observed in the wild identify important yet neglected stimulus regimes in weakly electric fish.
  J. Neurosci. url
• Jan Grewe, Alexandra Kruscha, Benjamin Lindner, Jan Benda (2017)
  Synchronous spikes are necessary but not sufficient for a synchrony code in populations of spiking neurons.
  Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 114, E1977-E1985. url
• Sandra Dangelmayer, Jan Benda, Jan Grewe (2016)
  Weakly electric fish learn both visual and electrosensory cues in a multisensory object discrimination task.
  J. Physiol. Paris online first, 1-12. url
• Lyuba Zehl, Florent Jaillet, Adrian Stoewer, Jan Grewe, Andrey Sobolev, Thomas Wachtler, Thomas G. Brochier, Alexa Riehle, Michael Denker, Sonja Grün (2016)
  Handling Metadata in a Neurophysiology Laboratory.
  Front. Neuroinform. 10, 26. url
• Anna Stöckl, Fabian Sinz, Jan Benda, Jan Grewe (2014)
  Encoding of social signals in all three electrosensory pathways of Eigenmannia virescens.
  J. Neurophysiol. 112, 2076-2091. url
• Henriette Walz, Jan Grewe, Jan Benda (2014)
  Static frequency tuning accounts for changes in neural synchrony evoked by transient communication signals.
  J. Neurophysiol. 112, 752-765. url
• Fabian H. Sinz, Anna Stöckl, Jan Grewe, Jan Benda (2013)
  Least informative dimensions.
  In C. J. C. Burges, L. Bottou, M. Welling, Z. Ghahramani, K. Q. Weinberger, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 pages 413-421. url
• Jan Benda, Jan Grewe, Rüdiger Krahe (2013)
  Neural noise in electrocommunication --- from burden to benefits.
  In Henrick Brumm, editor, Animal Communication and Noise, Animal Signals and Communication 2 pages 129-156. Springer
• Anne-Kathrin Warzecha, Ronny Rosner, Jan Grewe (2012)
  Impact and sources of neuronal variability in the fly's motion vision pathway.
  J. Physiol. Paris, url
• Jan Grewe, Thomas Wachtler, Jan Benda (2011)
  A bottom-up approach to data annotation in neurophysiology.
  Front. Neuroinform. 5, 16. url
• Ronny Rosner, Martin Egelhaaf, Jan Grewe, Anne-Kathrin Warzecha (2009)
  Variability of blowfly head optomotor responses.
  J. Exp. Biol. 212 pages 1170–1184
• Jan Grewe, Matti Weckstoem, Martin Egelhaaf, Anne-Kathrin Warzecha (2007)
  Information and discriminability as measures of reliability of sensory coding.
  PLoS One, 2:12
• Jan Grewe, Nelia Matos, Martin Egelhaaf, Anne-Kathrin Warzecha (2006)
  Information and discriminability as measures of reliability of sensory coding.
  J. Neurophysiol., 94:4 pages 1838–1847 url
• Martin Egelhaaf, Jan Grewe, Katja Karmeier, Roland Kern, Rafael Kurtz, Anne-Kathrin Warzecha (2005)
  Novel Approaches to Visual Processing in Insects: Case Studies on Neuronal Computations in the Blowfly.
  In Christensen, T.A., editor, Methods in Insect Sensory Neuroscience, chapter 7, pages 185–212, CRC-Press
• Jan Grewe, Jutta Kretzberg, Anne-Kathrin Warzecha, Martin Egelhaaf (2003)
  Impact of Photon Noise on the Reliability of a Motion-Sensitive Neuron in the Fly's Visual System.
  J. Neuroscience, 23:34 pages 10776–10783 url
• Martin Egelhaaf, Jan Grewe, Roland Kern, Anne-Kathrin Warzecha (2001)
  Outdoor performance of a motion-sensitive neuron in the blowfly.
  Vision Research, 41:27, pages 3627–3637