Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research

Post-Doc, Neuroanatomy

About

I obtained my Bachelor degree in Biology and my Master in Neurobiology from the University of Bucharest, one of the major Romanian higher education institutions.  In those times, as Eastern European research began to open to the international scientific world, I had the opportunity to compete for two prestigious scholarships within the TEMPUS and ERASMUS programs of the European Union.  Thus, as an undergraduate, I spent three months as research trainee at the Institute of Physiology (Eppendorf Hospital) in Hamburg, where I was introduced to patch-clamp on cells in culture, and later, during my graduate studies, five months as an exchange student at the MPI for Behavioral Physiology in Munich.

Following my Master studies, I joined Prof. Dr. Heinz Wässle’s Neuroanatomy group as a PhD student at the Max-Planck International Research School of the MPI for Brain Research (MPIBR) and MPI for Biophysics, in Frankfurt.  The seminal work carried out over the last decades by Dr. Wässle’s group laid the fundamentals of detailed retinal circuitry.  Within the efforts to isolate dedicated retinal subcircuits and identify key molecules involved, my specific contribution was to screen glutamate receptors (GluRs) expressed by different inhibitory amacrine cells (ACs).  I used single-cell patch-clamp recordings in mouse retinal slices, under application of pharmacological agents, combined with intracellular dye filling.  I was able to find differential expression of GluRs among AC populations, results published in Visual Neuroscience.

It followed a short postdoc in Prof. Dr. Hannah Monyer’s Clinical Neurobiology group at the University of Heidelberg, where I was involved in the electrophysiological characterization of different thalamic and cortical inhibitory interneurons in transgenic mice.  I decided to return to the retina as a model system and I joined Dr. David Berson’s group in the Neuroscience Department at Brown University, RI, USA.  Dr. Berson had recently discovered a peculiar retinal ganglion cell (GC), the melanopsin luminance detector, which functions as a photoreceptor in the circadian system.  Joining his lab meant a rare chance to become part of the group pioneering the retinal circuitry for melanopsin GCs (mGCs).  Together with our collaborators, we showed that several subtypes of these cells exist in the rodent retina, among them some that might be involved with classical vision.  Some of this work has been published in Neuron and another manuscript is currently in preparation for Journal of Neuroscience.  We also described a non-canonical pathway providing input to the main type of mGCs, work published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.

For personal reasons, two years ago I returned to Frankfurt and joined Dr. Silke Haverkamp at the MPIBR, as a senior post-doc.  Dr. Haverkamp enjoys extensive collaborations in the German retina community – I am thus involved in several projects with Dr. Thomas Euler at the University of Tübingen, Dr. Karin Dedek at the University of Oldenburg, and Dr. Jens Dübel at the University of Würzburg.  Within our Tübingen collaboration I focus on motion processing in the retina, specifically looking at neurotransmitter receptors in the direction-selective (DS) circuit, working to determine their precise localization and potential function in computing DS.  Using anatomical approaches and two-photon calcium imaging of GC light responses, we have already identified a GABA receptor critical for DS inhibition, whose inactivation severely impairs retinal direction selectivity.  The results of this project, which I coordinated, have been submitted to PLoS ONE.  Our Oldenburg/Würzburg collaboration is centered around two types of ACs, that we are characterizing anatomically and physiologically in transgenic mice.  The focus is on their intraretinal connections and their potential involvement in the same (single) retinal subcircuit.  Finally, I also had the opportunity to conduct a small project of my own, describing the inhibitory receptors of melanopsin GCs in the primate retina.  This was also a chance to be involved in the supervision and mentoring of a PhD student.  The findings of this project were reported in her first publication, in Neuroscience.

Ever since my undergraduate studies I had a particular interest in the nervous system and the aspiration to do scientific research.  The common thread throughout my academic progress has been to understand the organization and function of neural circuits, with a focus on inhibitory neurons and their neurotransmitter receptors.  During my PhD I was introduced to the retina, which remains my model system today, sharing the hope of the field that we will be able to extend the knowledge gained here to the more complex neural networks of the higher brain.