The main committee of the German Research Foundation (DFG) today announced the recipients of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, considered the highest honor for researchers in Germany. Among the ten awardees is Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller, co-director of BIFOLD and head of the Machine Learning Group at TU Berlin. He is regarded as a pioneer of machine learning and has been driving this important area of artificial intelligence (AI) since 1989. His work combines excellence in formal mathematical reasoning with a strongly application-oriented approach. His interdisciplinary method brings together fields such as biology, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science.

Neuroscientist Professor Dr. Kristine Krug from Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg has once again been appointed Visiting Professor of Neuroscience at the renowned University of Oxford in the UK. The Medical Sciences Board at Oxford University confirmed the unpaid title for a further five years.

Neuronal circuit models help researchers better understand how nerve cells in the brain work together and can be used computationally to advance brain research. A key step toward computational neuroscience was the model of early sensory cortex developed by Dr. Tobias Potjans and Prof. Markus Diesmann, known as PD14. Published in 2014, it has become a research standard – as a basis for more complex brain models, as a testbed for computational methods, and as a benchmark for the performance of new computer systems.

In April 2024, researchers from around the world met at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Cultures of Research” at RWTH Aachen University to reflect on the model’s importance for work in computational and theoretical neuroscience on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. The results of the symposium have now been published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. In this interview, Prof. Markus Diesmann and Prof. Hans Ekkehard Plesser, lead author of the report, discuss the significance of PD14 and the opportunities and challenges of digital neuroscience, as illustrated for example by the European research platform EBRAINS.