Starting in September 2019, Dr. Monika Scholz is leading the Max Planck Research Group ‘Neural Information Flow’.
Monika Scholz was born in Räckelwitz, Germany in 1988. With a prestigious fellowship from the German National Academic Foundation she studied Physics at the Julius-Maximilians-University in Würzburg, receiving her B.Sc. in 2010, and after further studies she received her Diploma degree in Physics from the Technical University Dresden in 2012. After moving to the US and joining the PhD-Program of the University of Chicago she worked with Aaron Dinner and David Biron. In 2014 she won a HHMI predoctoral fellowship, which supported her work on feeding behavior in C. elegans. She was awarded a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship and the Stephen B. H. Kent Prize in Biophysical Sciences for her dissertation. After obtaining her PhD-degree in Biophysics in 2017, she moved to Princeton University as a Dicke-Fellow in the Physics Department. There she used wholebrain calcium imaging of C. elegans to study the neural basis of behavior. Her long-term goal is to discover and describe the principles underlying information transfer, processing and compression in animals.
Scientific career
2019- | Max Planck Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior – caesar, Bonn, Germany |
2017-2019 | Dicke Fellow, Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA |
2012-2017 | PhD Student University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; with Aaron Dinner and David Biron |
2010-2012 | Diploma in Physics, Technical University Dresden, Dresden, Germany |
2008-2010 | BSc in Physics, Julius - Maximilians University, Würzburg, Germany |
Awards and Fellowships
2017-2019 | Dicke Fellowship, Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA |
2016-2017 | William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship |
2014-2017 | HHMI International Graduate Student Fellowship |
2012 | Awardee of Peirce Fellowship, Harvard University, declined |
2010 | Baron von Swaine Stipend, University of Würzburg |
2008-2012 | Scholarship, German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung) |
Contact:
Assistant: Bettina Bosse
Phone: +49-228-9656-267
E-Mail: monika.scholz@mpinb.mpg.de

Max Planck Group Leader