Yangfan Peng honored with the Du Bois-Reymond Prize

Dr. Yangfan Peng, junior group leader at the Clinic for Neurology with Experimental Neurology and the Neuroscience Research Center Charité, has been awarded the Du Bois-Reymond Prize by the German Physiological Society. This prize honors outstanding scientific achievements by early-career researchers and is endowed with 2,500 euros.

Yangfan Peng received the award for his significant publication in the journal Science, where he demonstrated that neurons in the human cerebral cortex communicate more purposefully than those in rodent brains. These findings suggest that information processing in the human brain may be more efficient, which could also impact the development of artificial neural networks.

The underlying data was collected using the multipatch method, which allows for the observation of communicating neurons and the analysis of signals from up to ten cells simultaneously. Peng successfully applied this method to human brain tissue for the first time, studying 1,170 neurons and approximately 7,200 connections.

During his PhD under Prof. Jörg Geiger at the Institute of Neurophysiology at the Charité, Peng significantly contributed to the advancement of this method and was awarded the Tiburtius Prize in 2018 for his dissertation. He is currently establishing his own research group and is working on a project involving deep brain stimulation in a Parkinson's mouse model as part of the Collaborative Research Center ReTune.

The Du Bois-Reymond Prize was awarded during the annual meeting of the German Physiological Society (DPG) on September 19, 2024, in Vienna. The prize money of 2,500 euros is provided by the Erwin Riesch Foundation in Tübingen. Each year, outstanding and independent scientific works by early-career researchers are honored, provided they are no older than two years and have been accepted or published in an internationally renowned journal.

Links:

• Ausgezeichnete Veröffentlichung in Science
• Pressemitteilung zur Science-Publikation
• Meldung zum Tiburtius-Preis
• Institut für Neurophysiologie
• Klinik für Neurologie mit Experimenteller Neurologie
• Neurowissenschaftliches Forschungszentrum
• Du Bois-Reymond Preis der Deutschen Physiologischen Gesellschaft
• Projekt von Dr. Yangfan Peng im Sonderforschungsbereich ReTune

Contact:
Dr. med. Yangfan Peng
Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
https://yangfanpeng.info/