Draft:Gabriele Scheler

Gabriele Dorothea Scheler (born 1960 in Göttingen) is a German-American computer scientist and neuroscientist. Her main contribution to neuroscience is a theory of neuroplasticity, which uses internal memory to guide adaptivity at the membrane. She is co-founder of the Carl Correns Foundation for Mathematical Biology. , a non-profit institute to further research and scholarship in mathematics applied to biology. The institute was founded in 2011, and went into operation in 2016. It was named after her great-grandfather Carl Erich Correns who pioneered the application of mathematical and statistical tools for theoretical discovery. It has gained reputation for research on neuroplasticity, pioneering a major new theory for molecular memory beyond the electrophysiological theories of LTP/LTD. She discussed her biography and the topics of AI, NeuroAI and genAI in an interview in 2024.

Early life and education
Gabriele Scheler grew up in Göttingen, as the daughter of Fritz Scheler, and Elisabeth Scheler née Correns, the daughter of Carl Wilhelm Correns, who had a formative influence on his granddaughter. Her family includes Erich Correns (chemist), Carl Erich Correns, Erich Correns (artist), de:Emil Ballowitz, Hugo Karl Anton Pernice, Erich Pernice, Werner Scheler, Max Scheler. She graduated from de:Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium_(Göttingen) as valedictorian three years early in 1977. After a year at the University of Tübingen, she moved to the Institute for logic and scientific theory at the LMU Munich, where she also did her Ph.D. Gabriele Scheler suffers from the consequences of a brain trauma, which she received in her early twenties, caused by a two-week coma in Berkeley 1983, probably induced by deliberate poisoning. A doctoral scholarship for Stanford University had to be declined because of this sudden illness. Her experience as a patient contributed to her resolve to investigate computational neuroscience problems with a view of later medical applications. She married in 1991 and had a son in 1995. Since 1998 she has lived in California, first in San Diego, and then in Mountain View.

Career
Scheler pioneered neural network research of linguistic semantics and grammatical categories. , and co-edited the first book on ML in NLP. While at Wilfried Brauer's group together with Sepp Hochreiter, she developed a novel approach for classification based on adaptive distance measures, later taken up by Yann LeCun and his group. . She moved to the Salk Institute in 1998, where she worked on topics such as dopamine and neuromodulation, neuronal synchronization, intrinsic plasticity and cell-internal protein signaling. At UC Berkeley (2001-2004), she collaborated with the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. From 2005 until 2011, she organized the Biological Modelling Club at Stanford, a dedicated group of researchers in mathematical and computational biology. There she invented a method for calculating dose-response matrices in protein signaling pathways with applications for drug development

She investigated lognormal distributions of intrinsic frequencies and synaptic strengths, and published work on localist memory, together with Johann Schumann. Most significantly, she pioneered a new theory of neural plasticity ("there is room on the inside"), which is a significant advance since the Hebbian synaptic plasticity theory of LTP/LTD ("Neurons that fire together, wire together").