Manuel Zimmer, Ph.D.

Manuel Zimmer studied biochemistry at the Free University of Berlin and performed his undergraduate thesis in 1998 on neuromuscular synapse formation with Steve Burden at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York University Medical School, New York. Afterward, he moved back to Germany to perform his Ph.D. work with Rüdiger Klein at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich, until 2003. Here, he focused on the molecular mechanisms that wire up the nervous system during development. From 2004 to 2010, he performed his postdoctoral studies with Cori Bargmann at the University of California, San Francisco, and Rockefeller University, New York. Here, he developed lab-on-a-chip and calcium-imaging techniques to investigate the chemosensory mechanisms by which animals sense oxygen in the environment. Since 2010, he has lived in Austria, where he works as an independent group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. Dr. Zimmer’s current research is focused on how neuronal network dynamics in the brain of C. elegans arise from sleep to wakefulness to engage in processing the sensory world and to produce competent behaviors, like foraging and navigation.

Current Project:
Neural Dynamics of a Multi-timescale Social Behavior

Past Project:

Dense Mapping of Dynamics onto Structure in the C. elegans Brain