Starting in September 2019, Dr. Monika Scholz is leading the Max Planck Research Group ‘Neural Information Flow’.

Monika Scholz was born in Räckelwitz, Germany in 1988. With a prestigious fellowship from the German National Academic Foundation she studied Physics at the Julius-Maximilians-University in Würzburg, receiving her B.Sc. in 2010, and after further studies she received her Diploma degree in Physics from the Technical University Dresden in 2012. After moving to the US and joining the PhD-Program of the University of Chicago she worked with Aaron Dinner and David Biron. In 2014 she won a HHMI predoctoral fellowship, which supported her work on feeding behavior in C. elegans. She was awarded a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship and the Stephen B. H. Kent Prize in Biophysical Sciences for her dissertation. After obtaining her PhD-degree in Biophysics in 2017, she moved to Princeton University as a Dicke-Fellow in the Physics Department. There she used wholebrain calcium imaging of C. elegans to study the neural basis of behavior. Her long-term goal is to discover and describe the principles underlying information transfer, processing and compression in animals.


Scientific career

2019- Max Planck Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior – caesar, Bonn, Germany
2017-2019 Dicke Fellow, Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
2012-2017 PhD Student University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; with Aaron Dinner and David Biron
2010-2012 Diploma in Physics, Technical University Dresden, Dresden, Germany
2008-2010 BSc in Physics, Julius - Maximilians University, Würzburg, Germany

Awards and Fellowships


2017-2019 Dicke Fellowship, Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
2016-2017 William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship
2014-2017 HHMI International Graduate Student Fellowship
2012 Awardee of Peirce Fellowship, Harvard University, declined
2010 Baron von Swaine Stipend, University of Würzburg
2008-2012 Scholarship, German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung)

Contact:

Assistant: Bettina Bosse
Phone: +49-228-9656-267

E-Mail: monika.scholz@mpinb.mpg.de

Dr. Monika Scholz
Max Planck Group Leader