I am German and obtained a Master of Arts in Neuro- & Rehabilitation Psychology at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. As an undergraduate, I collaborated with Lex Cools in the Department of Psychoneuropharmacology and used Wistar rats to develop animal models for Parkinson disease and schizophrenia. My schizophrenia research took me to Ruben Gur’s Brain Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, where I implemented fMRI and EEG to study emotion processing in faces of patients with schizophrenia. I then came to UCLA, where I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience. I first worked with David Glanzman to investigate the contribution of retrograde signaling to the facilitation of sensory-motor synapses and single motor neurons in the sea snail Aplysia Californica.

I am now a member of the Mody lab, where I am currently studying the Ca2+ binding kinetics of Calmodulin and Calbindin to determine the contribution of these proteins to neuronal function. The goal of my dissertation project is to measure the individual Ca2+ binding properties of Calmodulin and Calbindin by uncaging Ca2+ with an UV laser. Ca2+ binding to Calbindin and Calmodulin produces OGB-5N elicited fluorescent signals, which are fitted with a kinetic model to obtain their cooperative Ca2+ binding kinetics. To investigate, how the competition between Calbindin and Calmodulin regulates neuronal function, I patch clamp dissociated hippocampal granule cells of Calbindin KO mice to measure L-type calcium and SK-potassium channel currents. My dissertation project will determine the Ca2+ binding properties of Calmodulin and Calbindin more precisely than has been possible in the past and will yield new insights into how the competition for Ca2+ between these two proteins shapes intracellular Ca2+ transients to orchestrate neuronal function. This research has important implications for disorders such as ataxia and epilepsy, where this balance is perturbed.

Department of Neurology
UCLA School of Medicine
NRB 1, Room 555
635 Charles Young Drive South
Los Angeles, CA 90095-733522

    Lab:     (310) 206-3485
    FAX:     (310) 825-0033

timI#ucla.edu