The A-lab is coming!

Welcome to Alessio Attardo and his group “Hippocampal Plasticity and Stress”

Starting in February 2015, Alessio Attardo will build up a new group in the Department of Stress Neurobiology and Neurogenetics headed by Alon Chen at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. The new group is interested in the cellular and molecular mechanisms that enable neurons to compute and store information. Alessio Attardo aims at unraveling how these mechanisms work in neurons and give rise to the brain's ability to learn or recall new information and how stress influences such a remarkable ability.

Alessio Attardo was born and raised in Palermo (Italy), as he likes to say “right in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea”. After studying biology in Palermo, he completed his doctoral degree on cortical development at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden (Germany). During his postdoctoral training at Stanford University (USA), he investigated how dynamics of connectivity between specialized neurons might be the cellular foundation of memory and how the ability to discriminate different experiences declines with aging.

At the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, the new group will use optical imaging as a main tool together with molecular and computational techniques to investigate the cellular mechanisms by which specialized brain areas of mice encode and recall memories under normal and stressful conditions. “We will be focusing on basic research but we hope to generate fundamental knowledge that will benefit patient care on the long term,” states Alessio Attardo. “For the new group, we seek motivated and passionate researchers from different backgrounds (biology, physics, engineering and more) interested in the systems neurobiology of learning and memory.”

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