Dr. Wolf Singer

Featured Author: Wolf Singer

Wolf Singer (b. in Munich, Germany, 1943) studied medicine at the University of Munich, and received his M.D. in 1968 after completing his thesis on The role of telencephalic commissures in bilateral EEG-synchrony under Dr. O. Creutzfeldt at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry. After post-doctoral work at Sussex University in England, where he received training in psychophysics and animal behavior, Singer went back to the Creutzfeld lab to complete his post-doctoral training. In 1973, he took a position of staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry's Department of Neurophysiology. The same year, Wolf Singer started as a Lecturer in Neurophysiology at the Technical University of Munich where he was promoted to Full Professor in 1980. Since 1982 he has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt.

Prof. Singer has been invited to give prestigious lectures around the world over the course of his career, and has received numerous awards including the Körber Prize for the European Sciences, the Krieg Cortical Discoverer Award, the Hans Berger Prize, the Hebb Award. He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oldenburg (awarded 2005). Prof. Singer is a member of many editorial boards, scientific societies and academies, and has served as President of the European Neuroscience Association, and Secretary of the European Brain and Behavior Society. Prof. Singer was also made Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, one of the highest distinctions in France, and awarded Foreign Membership to the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Singer's work has focused on the study of neuronal synchronization and its potential role in perception. Because of the highly distributed processing of sensory information that exists in the cortex, a mechanism to bind all the elements into a coherent percept seems necessary. Prof. Singer contributed experimental evidence as well as theoretical advances to the Binding by Synchrony hypothesis. The results from his lab elicited wide interest, and motivated a number of studies on cell assemblies and temporal codes. For more information, visit http://www.mpih-frankfurt.mpg.de/global/Np/Staff/singer.htm.

Scholarpedia articles:

Binding by Synchrony. Scholarpedia, 2(12):1657 (2007)

(Author profile by Abdellatif Nemri)
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