Björn Brembs

Björn Brembs received his PhD from the University of Würzburg, Germany in 2000. His thesis advisor was Martin Heisenberg. After his postdoctoral work with John H. Byrne in Houston, Texas, USA, he started his own laboratory at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. Since 2012, Dr. Brembs is professor of neurogenetics at the University of Regensburg in Germany. His research focuses on the neurobiological mechanisms of spontaneous behaviors and operant learning. His discoveries include the identification of a nonlinear signature in spontaneous flight behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila, biophysical correlates of operant learning in an identified neuron in the marine snail Aplysia, a double dissociation of genetic mechanisms underlying operant and classical learning, a form of habit formation in flies as well as the neural substrate controlling it, and the involvement of the fly orthologue of the language-related gene FOXP2 in fruit fly operant self-learning.