Laura Schwarz

Laura joined the SWC as a PhD student working in John O’Keefe’s Lab. She is interested in social behaviours and their underlying neural mechanisms. Her project aims to understand how the brain computes familiarity, more specifically how animals learn to recognise each other. To address this question, she uses tracking algorithms and unsupervised classifiers to define behaviour and she plans to use electrophysiology to measure brain activity.

Laura grew up in the Black Forest and studied molecular biology in Basel. She joined Tom Mrsic-Flogels Lab as a Master student in 2017 and moved together with his lab to London in 2018. After her masters she joined Marcus Stephenson-Jones lab as a Research Assistant where she worked on the role of Dopamine in the tail of Striatum in learning a stimulus-action association. In 2021 she then moved on to Berlin to work again as a Research Assistant in the Lab of Dietmar Schmitz, but soon decided to come back to SWC to do her PhD.