Tim Gollisch honored with Bernard Katz Lecture award

Tim Gollisch honored with Bernard Katz Lecture award

This year's meeting of the Israel Society for Neuroscience will be held from 22.-24. November in Eilat, Israel. At this meeting, Dr. Tim Gollisch will have the honor of giving the Bernard Katz Lecture. The 36-year-old scientist will be distinguished for his fundamental research on visual coding; the process by which visual images arriving at the eye's retina are transformed into electrical impulses that can be understood by the brain. The prize committee was particularly impressed by the scientific topicality of Gollisch's work, his imaginative combination of theoretical methods and experimental data, and last but not least, the sheer volume and outstanding quality of the scientist's publications.
Tim Gollisch is head of the Independent Junior Research Group “Visual Coding” at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, on the outskirts of Munich.

The awardee
Vision is an extremely complex process. Before the brain can process optical impressions, these must first be transformed into electrical impulses by the nerve cells in the retina. By way of the patterns of electrical discharges between the nerve cells, complex visual images are relayed to the brain. Tim Gollisch and his group seek to identify the mechanisms responsible for this reprogramming of visual signals into electrical impulses and discharge patterns.

Tim Gollisch studied physics at the University of Heidelberg and received the Humboldt Prize for his doctoral thesis at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Between 2004 and 2007, he worked at Harvard University in USA and has been leading an Independent Junior Research Group at the MPI of Neurobiology ever since returning to Germany in 2007.

At the award ceremony, Tim Gollisch will lecture on: "Neural Code and Circuitry for Rapid Image Processing in the Retina".

More information on Tim Gollisch and on his work can be found under:
www.neuro.mpg.de/english/junior/visualcode

The award
The Bernard Katz Lecture was established in 1991 by Prof. Dr. Bert Sakmann, who won the Nobel Prize that year. Sakmann donated part of the prize money in a tribute to the lifework of his scientific mentor, the British Nobel Prize laureate Sir Bernard Katz. The award is alternately conferred on a young German scientist one year, who has the honor of holding a lecture in Israel, while a young Israeli travels to Germany to hold his/her lecture in Germany a year later. The award comes with prize money of US $ 7000.

Bert Sakmann shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his colleague Erwin Neher for their achievements in the field of ion channels in cell membranes. On becoming an emeritus professor, he established an extended emeritus group at the MPI of Neurobiology in Martinsried in January 2008. Since October 2009, he is the scientific director of the newly-founded Max Planck Institute in Florida.

Sir Bernard Katz was born in 1911 in Leipzig, where he studied medicine. From 1934 on, he carried out much of his research at University College in London. His work on the neurotransmission between nerves and muscles provided the basis for the modern physiology of synapses, the contact points of the nerve cells. In 1970, he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. In 2003, Sir Bernard Katz died at the age of 92 in London.