Vanessa Stempel

Vanessa Stempel is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Germany, where she heads the Instinctive Behaviour Circuits Group. Her research investigates the neural circuits underlying instinctive behaviors (e.g., hunting, escape, mating) in rodents, focusing on how synaptic and cellular mechanisms enable behavioral flexibility through adaptive information processing.

• Education: PhD in Neuroscience (2015) from Free University of Berlin and Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin; MSc in Biomedicine (2009) at UCL; BSc in Biology (2008).

Her work combines in vivo neural activity recordings and behavioral manipulations with molecular, cellular, and circuit-level analyses in vitro. Recent publications explore the role of GABAergic neurons in escape behavior (2024, Current Biology) and the evolutionary conservation of brainstem circuits (2024, Current Opinion in Neurobiology).

Scientific awards include the ERC Starting Grant (2025–2029), Behrens-Weise Foundation funding (2023–2025), and the UCL Early Career Neuroscience Prize (2019). She previously held a DFG postdoctoral fellowship (2017–2020) and a DAAD undergraduate scholarship (2007–2008).

The lab she leads focuses on adaptive behavior, neural plasticity, and evolutionary neuroscience, with affiliations to institutions in Germany, the UK, Hungary, and Poland.