Rogier Poorthuis, PhD student at the department of Integrative Neurophysiology, receives a Rubicon grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). He will join the group of Johannes Letzkus at the MPI for Brain Research in Frankfurt.
Rogier Poorthuis, PhD student at the department of Integrative Neurophysiology, receives a Rubicon grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). He will join the group of Johannes Letzkus at the MPI for Brain Research in Frankfurt. With the grant, Poothuis will investigate how attention alters processing of sensory information in the brain. Ninety researchers applied for this grant but only 17 proposals were awarded. The grant allows for a stay at the MPI for two years.
Rubicon
International research experience is often essential for building up one’s scientific career. Rubicon offers talented researchers who have completed their doctorates in the past year the chance to gain experience at a top research institution outside the Netherlands, as international research experience is likely to be an advantage at a later stage in the applicant’s academic career.
Research at the MPI
The human brain continuously receives a vast amount of sensory information about the environment. This makes attention, the process by which we select relevant stimuli for processing and ignore irrelevant input, a fundamentally important brain function. The prefrontal cortex is crucial for attention and enhances processing of relevant stimuli. With the grant, Poorthuis will develop behavioral paradigms to assess whether the prefrontal cortex influences processing of auditory information during attention. In particular, he will study how the prefrontal cortex alters the computational properties of neuronal circuits in the auditory cortex to facilitate processing of auditory information. Neuronal microcircuitries will be studied with state-of-the-art techniques like optogenetics and in vivo two-photon imaging.