Maurer, Benedikt

Research Interests

The underlying mechanisms of memory and learning in the brain are still poorly understood. Engineered biological neural networks with reduced complexity on microelectrode arrays (MEAs) could serve fundamental neuroscience research as a robust and explainable model system for long-term experiments.

Spiking behaviour is heavily affected by environmental parameters such as temperature, pH and osmolarity. In my work I develop a long-term culturing and MEA-based electrophysiology readout system, with closed-loop stimulation and fluidic control. This will facilitate high-throughput, week-long experiments investigating activity-dependent plasticity effects and drug experiments.

CMOS HD-MEAs offer subcellular resolution, which can enable the unravelling of the information flow through patterned networks. I work with deriving the principles of the network input-output relationship by analysing the activity patterns following electrical stimuli.

Student projects

If you are looking for a project or thesis and the topics I work on sound interesting to you feel free to contact me via e-mail to discuss potential projects. Please attach your CV and recent transcript of records. I can offer projects with focus on hardware development, coding and data analysis or cell culturing.

Education

I obtained my Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering with a specialisation on Biomedical Systems Engineering from RWTH Aachen University in 2021. My Master education comprised one academic year at Imperial College London, a 6 month industry internship at CorTec GmbH in Freiburg i. Br. and a Master thesis in the Micro-Nanosystems and Bioelectronics group at IWE1, RWTH Aachen. In November 2021 I joined LBB as a PhD student to work in the field of bottom-up neuroscience.