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.
Come and join our team
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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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Rachael Stentiford, PhDPostdoctoral researcherI am a computational neuroethologist interested in the neural circuits underlying navigation across species. Since 2026, I am postdoc at the University of Würzburg where I am combining virtual reality and electrophysiology to study the neural mechanisms of spatial memory honeybees. My previous work has combined experimental neuroscience, spiking neural network modelling, and robotics to understand how brains compute orientation and guide behaviour.
I began with a Natural Sciences undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Biology at the University of Birmingham, followed by a Master’s in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, where conducted neural recordings from the hippocampus of navigating rodents. During my PhD at the University of Bristol, I studied motor adaptation and forward internal models by recording from motor cortex and cerebellum during adaptive behaviour. I then moved to the Bristol Robotics Laboratory as part of the Human Brain Project, where I developed spiking neural network models of head direction circuits integrated with robotic systems. At the University of Sussex, I shifted to insects, modelling the central complex as a neural compass under naturalistic visual input. Before moving to Würzburg, I worked in Andrew Straw's lab at the University of Freiburg, applying high-resolution tracking technologies to track freely flying honeybees. |
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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, PhDGuest researcher
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Leonie Kollek, BSc
Master studentTo 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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