Moritz Helmstaedter

Moritz Helmstaedter is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany.

His work aims at pushing the frontiers of Connectomics, an emerging research field occupied with mapping neuronal networks in the brain at unprecedented scale and resolution. Before joining the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in 2014, he was a Research Group leader and Principal Investigator at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich (2011-2014).

Born in Berlin in 1978, Moritz studied medicine and physics at Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg. He completed his doctoral thesis with Nobel laureate Bert Sakmann, followed by post-doctoral work with Winfried Denk, both at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany.

Additional appointments include Professor (Chair, extraordinary professor) for Neuronal Networks at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands (since 2016), member of the foundation board of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (since 2020) and member of the life sciences committee of Leopoldina (since 2023).