Dr. Marion Sillies is currently a neuroscience professor at Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz. Previously, she has been a group leader at the European Neuroscience Institute in Göttingen. She trained as a Postdoc in Tom Clandinin’s lab at Stanford University where she mapped and characterized motion detection circuits and established the InSITE toolkit, a collection of driver lines that allows genetic access to in principle any cell type in the brain. Dr. Marion Silies obtained her PhD in 2009 at the University of Münster, where she worked in the lab of Christian Klämbt on the migration of glial cells. She holds a diploma in Biology from the University of Münster. She will talk about how to be successful writing grants of application based on her experience.

Dr. Marion Sillies is interested in understanding how neural circuits perform specific computations. Her lab has been studying this in the visual system of Drosophila. They have investigated the mechanisms and circuitry underlying motion computation, and are currently investigating how visual processing strategies can function robustly in dynamically changing environments. They are also continuously developing novel genetic tools to enhance the possibilities that working with fruit flies as a model organism offers. This gives them the opportunity to obtain causal relationships, linking molecular mechanisms to circuit function and ultimately, animal behavior.