Position:	PhD Student -- ended Jul 2019
Email:	sgregor@ini.uzh.ch
Work phone:	-
Location:	55g79-d3

From early on in my education I developed a strong interest in science, and biology in particular, which led me to study biosciences at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, with a guest visit at the National University of Singapore. I graduated in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree and then joined the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, for my master’s studies in neuroscience.
As a master student, I soon joined the lab of Prof. Kevan Martin at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) for a short project, and was immediately absorbed by the unique atmosphere of this institute. I have stayed here ever since and am a senior PhD student, now. INI is a very interdisciplinary environment and has been extremely stimulating for me, it encouraged me to extend my neuroscience background and strong experimental training with skills and experiences in data analysis, statistics, and programming. I have been involved in several projects over the years, always with the goal to understand something about the neuronal circuits that are embedded in the neocortex.
Initially, I used electron microscopy to investigate the synapses in motor cortex that come from the thalamus and found - opposite to the common belief at the time - that the thalamus provides a major source of excitatory synapses in the middle layer of M1, which challenged the current text-book opinion how voluntary movements are generated in the brain and contributed to an ongoing paradigm-shift in the field.
Currently, I use whole-cell patch-clamp to record the activity of two neurons of mouse neocortex simultaneously. When the neurons are connected by a synapse, I am able to record and characterise synaptic transmission. In a next step, we locate the same synapses in the electron microscope and reconstruct them and measure their size and shape. Ultimately, we are developing a method to predict the strength of a synapse only from its anatomical features. This is important because large volumes of the brain are reconstructed using electron microscopy with the goal to understand the function of the embedded neuronal circuits, which requires that one is able to infer the physiological features of synapses only from their anatomy. At the same time, we use this approach to understand better the properties of synaptic transmission in the neocortex.
My free-time I dedicate largely to a variety of sports.