Sonja Hofer

Sonja Hofer is a Group Leader at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour in London since 2018. She undertook her PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany, after which she went to University College London, UK, as a Postdoc and later a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow. From 2013 to 2017 she held an Assistant Professorship at the Biozentrum, University Basel, Switzerland.

Her research aims to understand the synaptic organization, function and plasticity of circuits underlying visual processing in the mammalian brain. Current research in her lab is mainly focused on understanding how different contextual signals are integrated with feed-forward visual information, how such signals emerge and by which pathways they are conveyed, especially focusing on thalamo-cortical and cortico-cortical interactions. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and the Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize.