News
10/2024
- Big News! We are moving (& hiring). In July 2025, we are moving to Yale University. Randolph will join the Departments of Psychology and Neurology and become a Wu-Tsai Investigator.
- We will hire several PhD students, either through the Psychology program or the Neuroscience program. The application deadline is December 1st! If you’re interested in applying, reach out to Randolph at randolph.helfrich@yale.edu
- New paper published in Progress in Neurobiology by Michael Hahn on information coding efficiency during human and rodent sleep!
- New paper published in Journal of Neuroscience spearheaded by Janna Lendner. We show that human sleep is not only governed by sleep oscillations, but also by several intrinsic neural timescales that shape the 1/f background activity.
- Isabel Raposo, Jan Martini and Randolph Helfrich were at SFN2024 in Chicago and presented new work on intrinsic timescales during human attention, the role of neural variability of cognitive flexibility and the neurophysiological basis of 1/f behaviors. Stay tuned for the manuscripts.
- Sianna Grösser joins the lab for an internship and will work on aperiodic sleep cycles.
09/2024
- The lab turns 4! We celebrated this occasion during our annual lab retreat in the Black Forest this year !
- New Spotlight published in Trends in Neurosciences. We discuss exciting new work that implies that non-oscillatory (or aperiodic) network states might define different sleep stages.
- New preprint in collaboration with Sabine Kastner’s lab at Princeton on high-frequency bursts during attentional allocation
- New paper published in eNeuro, spearheaded by Markus Kopf as part of his medical thesis where he nicely demonstrates that patients suffering from genetically generalized epilepsy exhibit altered aperiodic background activity in MEG.
- Janna Lendner and Michael Hahn presented new work on aperiodic activity during sleep and SO-spindle coupling during cortical maturation at ESRS in Sevilla!
06-08/2024
- Randolph was interviewed by the Hertie Foundation (in German). Find the interview here: https://www.ghst.de/randolph-helfrich-interview-gesunder-schlaf
- Gabriela Iwama and Frank van Schalkwijk attended FENS in Vienna, where Gabriela presented new work on learned visual expectations.
- The Oxford Handbook of Human Memory is now out. Find ours and may other exciting chapters as preprints here: https://memory.psych.upenn.edu/Oxford_Handbook_of_Human_Memory
05/2024
- The team attended PuG 2024 in Hamburg and presented several new posters !
03/2024
- Matthias Anwander finished his M.Sc. thesis and graduated from the GTC in Tübingen! Congratulations. Best of luck for the future and your PhD position at the University of Augsburg.
12/2023
- Paper accepted just before the holidays: Jan’s paper on subspace synchronization is now in press in Nature Communications under a new title: Ramping dynamic and theta oscillations reflect dissociable signatures during rule-guided human behavior.
- Joint lab meeting with the Oganian and Breska labs:
11/2023
- Laura Heidiri will stay onboard for her PhD after the Master’s at the GTC. Welcome again, Laura!
- Jan, Neha, Gabriela, and Jonas attended BrainModes in Hamburg.
- New paper about sleep-spindles across development by our postdoc Michi Hahn in collaboration with Anka Joechner and team now published in Elife.
10/2023
- Mariana, Gabriela, and Isabel presented at the The Brain Conference: Structuring Knowledge for Flexible Behaviour!
- New paper published in Current Biology by Isabel on the causal nature of rhythmic attention sampling! Check the preprint.
- Victoria Mair joins for the lab for her M.D. thesis – welcome!
09/2023
- Lab Turns Three! Celebrating three years of growth, collaboration, and discovery.
- Jan Martini Presents at Tuebingen Systems Neuroscience Symposium! Jan’s impactful presentation highlights our commitment to advancing neuroscience at the symposium.
- The team enjoyed an inspiring retreat, fostering ideas and strengthening bonds in the beautiful Black Forest.
08/2023
- New paper published in Science Advances led by Janna Lendner. Also see the release by the University Medical Center Tübingen!
07/2023
- We have a new PhD position available!
06/2023
- Gabriela was awarded a PhD fellowship by the Landesgraduiertenförderung Baden-Württemberg!
- Jan and Gabriela’s Paper is now published in PNAS: Subspace partitioning in human prefrontal cortex resolves cognitive interference.
- New paper led by Frank van Schalkwijk now published in Progress in Neurobiology: An evolutionary conserved division-of-labor between archicortical and neocortical ripples organizes information transfer during sleep.
- Our lab presented our research in the 48th edition of “Psychologie und Gehirn” (PuG2023) conference in Tübingen, Germany. Jan Weber and Marit Petzka organized a symposium about alpha oscillations and sleep spindles!
04/2023
- Our lab made quite an impression at the 2023 International Conference on Learning and Memory (LEARNMEM) in California, LA with presentations from Janna Lendner, Michael Hahn, Frank van Schalkwijk, and Randolph Helfrich!
- Michael Hahn was awarded with a PRIME fellowship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to investigate oscillatory and fractal dynamics in service of human working memory in collaboration with Dr. Nicholas Myers at University of Nottingham.
- Welcome to our new lab members Neha Binish and Laura Heidiri! Neha joined us as new PhD student to investigate principles of cortical communication. Laura will study the neurophysiology of epileptic episodes in her master thesis.
02/2023
- Michael Hahn won the best Blitzpresentation Award during the Wintersymposium for Sleep, Cognition and Consciousness at Werfenweng, Austria for his talk “Neural information coding differences in human and rodent sleep”!
- Randolph, Janna, Frank and Michael presented their research in the 20th Anniversary of the “Laboratory for Sleep, Cognition & Consciousness Research” in Salzburg, Austria.
- After a successful rotation project, Matthias Anwander will stay in our lab for his master thesis!
11/2022
- New preprint by Jan Weber and Gabriela Iwama: Subspace partitioning in human prefrontal cortex resolves cognitive interference.
- Jonas Terlau received an award for his thesis in medicine by the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.
- Michael Hahn was awarded the Young Scientist Award 2022 by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schlafforschung und Schlafmedizin e.V. (DGSM).
- New preprint by Isabel Raposo: Periodic neglect after frontoparietal lesions provides causal evidence for rhythmic attention sampling.
- Frank van Schalkwijk was awarded with the Walter Benjamin Fellowship by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for the project titled “The pathophysiology of sleep-dependent memory consolidation”.
- Welcome to our new lab rotation student Matthias Anwander!
10/2022
- New preprint by Frank van Schalkwijk: An Evolutionary Conserved Division-of-Labor between Hippocampal and Neocortical Sharp-Wave Ripples Organizes Information Transfer During Sleep.
- First lab retreat at the Black Forest.
- PhD position available with Zeynep Akata and Steffi Liebe as part of the Else-Kroener-Fresenius funded ClinBrAIn Initiative.
- New book chapter accepted for The SAGE Handbook of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience with Bob Knight on Neural Recordings and Time Series Analyses.
- Welcome Gabriela Iwama as a new PhD student.
- Welcome Mariana Lomelí who joins as a new PhD student in collaboration with Nick Myers at the University of Nottingham. Newly funded joint project by the University of Nottingham and the University of Tübingen’s funding as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments, in close collaboration with the University of Nottingham as well as the BBSRC International Partnership Fund.
- Michael Hahn wins the Early career award of the German Society of Sleep Medicine and Research (DGSM).
- New book chapter published by Randolph: Human Cognitive Intracranial Neurophysiology.
09/2022
- New preprint by postdocs Michael Hahn and Janna Lendner with Kerstin Hoedlmosers lab: Spectral slope and neural complexity as robust markers of task demand and brain state during sleep and wakefulness.
- Jonas Terlau joins the lab as a postdoc and clinician-scientist in neurology after having finished his medical studies in Muenster.
- Welcome Kirsti Brandes and Martin Cotrina who join the group for a GTC M.Sc. rotation project.
- Michael Hahn wins the Dissertation prize of the Austrian Society for Psychology (ÖGP).
- Gabriela Iwama finished her Master thesis and was awarded IMPRS bridging funds to join our group later this year as a PhD student.
- Book chapter accepted for the forthcoming book in Honor of Helen Neville: Making memories last: How sleep promotes neuroplasticity.
08/2022
- New book chapter from Janna and Randolph accepted for Nikolai Axmachers forthcoming book on iEEG and cognitive neuroscience.
06/2022
- DGPA Poster Award for Gabriela and Jan for their work on “Conjunctive Coding of the Past and Present Impairs Human Behavior”.
05/2022
- Book chapter “Methods to Study Human Memory” accepted for the upcoming Oxford Handbook on Memory edited by Mike Kahana and Anthony Wagner with Bob Knight and Mark D’Esposito.
- New preprint by Janna Lendner: Changes of oscillatory and aperiodic neuronal activity in working memory following anaesthesia: a prospective observational study
02/2022
- New paper by Michael Hahn in eLife: Slow oscillation–spindle coupling strength predicts real-life gross-motor learning in adolescents and adults
12/2021
- New preprint by Jan Weber: Population coding and oscillatory subspace synchronization integrate context into actions.