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31.01.2023

ERC Consolidator Grants for two Tübingen researchers

Grants go to AI researcher Jakob Macke and neuroscientist Tobias Kaufmann

Two researchers from the University of Tübingen and the University Hospitals receive a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Consolidator Grants support outstanding researchers with several years of research experience in consolidating their careers and building their own research teams.

Using Deep Learning to Make Better Models of the Brain

Portrait of Jakob Macke — Professor Jakob Macke

Tübingen AI researcher, Professor Jakob Macke, is aiming to use Deep Learning methods to build new neuronal networks at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning. The project ‘DeepCoMechTome’, which is receiving close to two million euros from the European Research Council, is focused on the brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The fruit fly’s brain has over 100,000 nerve cells and several million connections. Macke is a member of the “Tübingen Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning. New Perspectives for Science” as well as of the Tübingen AI Center, which is funded by the federal government, and is speaker of the “Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Tübingen”.

The brain of Drosophila, which is one of the best known model organisms in biology, is interesting to both neuroscientists and computer scientists for several reasons. “Fruit flies only have tiny brains in comparison to mammals,” explains Macke, “Nevertheless, these animals have astonishing capabilities, such as highly precise control of their flight. They can use landmarks to orient themselves and respond rapidly when predators approach.” Despite its massive capacity, the brain of Drosophila only uses nanowatts of energy, making it far more energy-efficient than any computer.

In recent decades biological research has succeeded in analyzing the brain of the fruit fly at a high level of detail. “We now have access to the brain’s circuitry, but until now we haven’t been able to build any models that can solve tasks which are as challenging as those solved by real Drosophila brains.” Meanwhile, recent advances in Deep Learning have made it possible to create artificial neuronal networks that can carry out extremely complicated calculations. However, these artificial networks have become very different in architecture and functioning to biological ones.

“We want to bring these two worlds back together,” explains the AI researcher, “Our goal now is to create artificial neuronal networks that, in composition and structure, are similar to the brain of fruit flies, but at the same time can perform similarly complex computations.” This requires innovative machine learning methods, which will be developed and applied in the project, in close cooperation with Srinivas Turaga from the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, and other researchers. Such methods could also be used for neuroscientific research into animals with more complex brains, such as fish or mammals.

Exploring the brain after failed pregnancy

Portrait of Tobias Kaufmann — Professor Tobias Kaufmann

Professor Tobias Kaufmann, Professor of Neurotechnology and Computational Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for his research project "Modeling and maintaining maternal mental health". The project on neuroscientific research into brain plasticity after pregnancy failure will be funded with a total of around 2 million euros over a period of five years.

Pregnancy failure is still a socially taboo subject that is relatively rarely talked about openly. Yet in Germany, about 15 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in early failure and about four out of every 1,000 pregnancies end in stillbirth. The early loss of a baby is often a traumatic event for the parents-to-be, and its impact on the mothers affected is often underestimated. Thus, their risk of mental illness is significantly increased after the loss - not only immediately, but also during subsequent pregnancies.

"Pregnancy failure is a neuroscientifically under-researched topic. It is known that the female brain is restructured in the course of pregnancy; however, we do not know what dynamics underlie these processes when a baby is lost. We also know little about which factors act together on the brain after such a loss and how mental illness manifests in the brains of affected women. This is precisely where our research comes in, and we hope to gain a better understanding of the process by which mental illnesses develop," explains Tobias Kaufmann.

Mental illnesses do not have one single trigger, but are usually based on several factors. In studying the particularly critical phase after a failed pregnancy, the researchers seek to analyze the interplay of various factors, such as genetics and hormones, and sociostructural influences. The aim is to find out how these factors affect the structure and function of the brain over a certain period of time.

To this end, women are accompanied in the weeks following their loss and examined several times in order to build up a broad database, which is then analyzed using complex statistical methods. Based on these studies, Professor Kaufmann's team hopes to gain insights into the development of mental illness.

Karl G. Rijkhoek/Public Relations Department; University Hospital press release

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