Beetz Lab
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Come and join our team

If you are interested in our research and want to be part of our team do not hesitate to contact me.

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M. Jerome Beetz, Dr. rer. nat.

Principal Investigator

I am neuroethologist interested in how different animals navigate. In the past, I have worked with diverse species, e.g., locusts, butterflies, and bats. As a Bachelor and Master student, I have worked on polarization vision in desert locusts, in the lab of Uwe Homberg. During my PhD in the lab of Manfred Kössl at the University of Frankfurt, I had the privilege to work with echolocating bats and studied how naturalistic echolocation sequences are processed along the auditory pathway. For my postdoc, I moved to Basil el Jundi's lab where I developed tetrode recordings from the brain of tethered flying monarch butterflies. With this technique, I studied the neural processing of head directions and goal directions while the butterfly was actively orienting. As a research fellow in Keram Pfeiffer's lab, I started to work on the spatial memory of bees. In 2025, I launched my Emmy Noether group in Würzburg. 


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Nicolas Scheuring, BSc

Master student

For my bachelor thesis, I studied how honeybees use and store different types of visual landmarks in a spatial memory task. For my masters, I decided to broaden my methodological spectrum and started to conduct tetrode recordings from freely walking bumblebees.
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Itay Bleichman, MSc

Guest researcher
from the Ayali Lab (Tel-Aviv University)

My main interest is neuroethology and sensory processing. I investigate how the brain filters and extracts meaningful information from complex environments, and how this information is translated to behaviors. Currently, I am focusing on visual processing, investigating collective motion-related neural circuits in the desert locust.
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Leonie Kollek, BSc

Master student

To communicate the direction to a food source inside the dark hive, dancing bees use the gravity axis as reference. For my bachelor thesis, I studied the sensory organs responsible for gravity sensing and their role for the waggle dance. Currently, I am learning to conduct tetrode recordings to search for neurons in the central brain that are important for gravosensation. 
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Annabell Weßner, BSc

Master student

For my Bachelor's thesis, I studied the orientation behavior of honeybees that were tethered in a flight simulator. There, they can freely rotate around their body axis with respect to a compass cue. As a master student, I started to work on sensory hairs that may be relevant for gravosensation. 
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Beetz Lab

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