Marcel Oberländer

Dr. Marcel Oberländer leads the In-Silico Brain Sciences research group at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior - caesar and is affiliated with the University of Bonn's Transdisciplinary Research Area: Life and Health. His research integrates network anatomy, cellular physiology, and computational modeling to understand neural mechanisms underlying perception and decision-making.

Using the rodent whisker system as a model, his team develops anatomically constrained network simulations to study sensory-guided behaviors like texture discrimination. Recent work reveals how horizontal projections in cortical deep layers gate output signals and how structural heterogeneity maintains excitation-inhibition balance in neural circuits.

Oberländer employs multidisciplinary approaches including in vivo electrophysiology, neural tracing, and biologically realistic simulations to establish structure-function relationships in cortical microcircuits.