FIAS Fellow Sebastian Thallmair was appointed today as a W2 professor at Goethe University Frankfurt. He will join the Department of Biochemistry, Chemistry, and Pharmacy on April 15, 2026. In parlallel, he will continue to serve as a research group leader at FIAS.

The research group led by FIAS Senior Fellow Kaschube published an article on the significance of brain network mechanisms for creativity. It explores the possibilities and necessity of a neuroscientific perspective on neural network mechanisms in the creative process. The article emerged from a conference on creativity; the follow-up will take place on April 16.

On March 31, Elena Spinetti successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, titled “Early events in the ectivation of membrane protein controlled signaling pathways.” As part of the research group led by FIAS Senior Fellow Roberto Covino, she studied a protein that plays a role in diseases such as diabetes.

Gianmarco Lazzeri successfully defended his PhD today. He has been working on molecular dynamics simulations of complex membrane-protein systems in the laboratory of FIAS Senior Fellow Roberto Covino. His research combines artificial intelligence with rigorous statistical mechanics and rare-event theory to study biomolecular processes that are difficult to capture using conventional simulations.

FIAS Senior Fellow Jochen Triesch demonstrated just how closely the natural sciences are linked to philosophical questions in his lecture on consciousness and intelligence, held on March 26 at the FIAS Forum. In addition to defining these concepts, the lecture focused on “replicating” human learning and comparing it with artificial intelligence (AI). The approximately 80 guests were enthusiastic and engaged in lively discussion afterward.

As a guest of FIAS, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence, gave his lecture Artificial Intelligence on 23 March. Due to the high level of interest, the event was moved to the larger lecture hall H3 at the Otto Stern Centre of Goethe University Frankfurt, where it drew a full audience.

Serena Maria Arghittu from the group of FIAS Senior Fellow Roberto Covino successfully defended her PhD thesis in March. In her thesis - Self-regulatory Mechanisms of Proteins at the Cell Surface - she investigated how proteins at the cell surface autonomously adapt to their local environment, a fundamental question in cell biology with implications for how cells achieve signalling robustness and precision in complex surroundings.

Oddharak Tyagi successfully defended his dissertation at FIAS. Working in the research group of FIAS Fellow Ivan Kisel, he developed an algorithm that helps us understand the processes immediately following the Big Bang.

How does the brain process sensory stimuli—and what role do the connections between neighboring neurons play in this process? The new research project INTERACTION is dedicated to addressing this central question in neuroscience. The goal is to understand how local networks in the brain convert incoming signals into structured patterns of activity, thereby laying the foundation for perception.

On March 10, Frankfurt's neuroscience institutions demonstrated how much brainpower the city has to offer with a fantastic event: in short, colorful presentations, young researchers took the audience into the world of brain research.

The 2026 Giersch Conference at FIAS also marks the kick-off event for the SCALE Cluster of Excellence. The motto: “Towards digital twins for structural cell biology – criteria, chances, and challenges.”

Renan Góes-Hirayama finished his PhD in the group of FIAS Fellow Hannah Elfner in February. He studied how the electromagnetic radiation produced in collisions of heavy nuclei - such as those performed at CERN (Genebra) and GSI (Darmstadt) - can be used to understand the building blocks of matter.

Camile Fraga Delfino Kunz successfully defended her doctoral thesis in Bioinformatics at Goethe University Frankfurt on 19 February. In her work at Franziska Matthäus' group at FIAS, she investigated how complex biological patterns. She explored how complex biological patterns — such as those underlying hair follicle and feather bud formation — emerge from the interaction of two fundamental mechanisms: diffusion-driven instability and chemotaxis. While each process can independently generate spatial structures, her work focused on uncovering what new behavior arises when both mechanisms are coupled within a single mathematical model.

From January 27–29, 2026, the final status meeting of SPP‑2041 was held at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) in Frankfurt. Over three days, participating groups presented their latest results through talks and poster sessions, highlighting major advances across experimental, theoretical, and computational connectomics.

In two publications, the group led by FIAS Fellow Sebastian Thallmair presents biological agents that can be switched using light. One target is an enzyme that plays a role in Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. The other is a lipid that makes that can be used to specifically modify cell membranes with the help of light.

FIAS Director Jan Wörner gave a Christmas lecture entitled “Advent in the Universe.” He reflected on the period from the creation of the universe over the course of a year and the Advent season, right up to an outlook for the new year.

Xia Xu defended his thesis in the group of Jochen Triesch on December 10. He studied how infant-inspired learning can lead to the next level of developmental AI.

Zhengyang Yu finished his PhD in the group of Jochen Triesch on December 10th. “We hope to build a bridge between infant vision and deep learning,” Yu says. In his PhD thesis he shows that representation learning can benefit from the same kind of natural, continuous visual experience that toddlers gain through active, self-directed exploration. By replacing traditional data augmentation with temporally adjacent frames from real visual play sequences, his self-supervised model learned robust object representations comparable to those achieved with full supervision.

Experiments with tiny particles of large mass—such as compressed baryonic matter (CBM)—are an important pillar of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt. The CBM experiment at the FAIR accelerator will record up to ten million heavy ion collisions per second. Under these conditions, an online trigger is required to select events that may contain signatures of quark-gluon plasma. In his dissertation, supervised by FIAS Fellow Ivan Kisel, Artemiy Belousov investigated how neural-network approaches can support this task.

Felix Weiglhofer's dissertation, supervised by FIAS Senior Fellow Volker Lindenstruth, addresses the question of how large amounts of data can be processed in real time. It enables rare particle interactions to be recorded and analyzed—and thus provides insight into the microseconds after the Big Bang.