Ilka Diester

Clinical neuroscience session | The title of the talk is not defined yet.

Ilka Diester is a Professor of Optophysiology at the University of Freiburg, where she leads the Optophysiology Lab funded by the BrainLinks-BrainTools Cluster of Excellence.

She studied biology at Humboldt University in Berlin and received her PhD from the University of Tübingen for her work on numerical representations in the monkey cortex, which earned her the Academy Prize for Biology in 2009. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, in the labs of Karl Deisseroth and Krishna Shenoy, where she established the use of optogenetics in monkeys, she founded her own lab at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute, in Frankfurt.

Her research combines electrophysiology, optogenetics, and behavioral analyses to investigate neural mechanisms of movement and motor control. Recognized with multiple awards, including the Bernstein Award and an ERC Starting Grant, her work advances understanding of motor circuits and informs the development of prosthetic technologies and treatments for movement disorders.