Tatjana Tchumatchenko

Tatjana Tchumatchenko (born 1980) is a physicist in the field of theoretical neuroscience. She is an independent Max Planck Group Leader and, since November 2020, professor for Computational Neuroscience of Behavior at the Faculty of Medicine of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Germany). In her research she investigates how neural networks compute and how particular activity patterns emerge from synaptic and neuronal features.

Education and early research
In 2006, Tchumatchenko obtained her diploma in physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany). In 2010, she completed the Graduate Program “Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience” at the Göttingen Graduate Center for Neurosciences, Biophysics, and Molecular Biosciences at Göttingen University (Germany), and received the degree of Dr. rer. nat in physics. In 2011, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with a joint appointment at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Göttingen. From 2011 to 2013, Tatjana Tchumatchenko was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University in the City of New York, USA, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Career
In 2013, Tchumatchenko became an Independent Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (Germany). Her group „Theory of neural dynamics” focuses on the computational modelling and mathematical analysis of single neurons, neuronal populations, and recurrent networks. The Tchumatchenko group employs mathematical tools and computer simulations to investigate how single neurons and populations respond to their synaptic inputs, and how they interact to give rise to functioning neuronal circuits.

Selected memberships

 * Bernstein Network for Computational Neuroscience
 * International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Neural Circuits
 * German-Ukrainian Academic Society

Selected Awards and Honours

 * 2020: Member of the Young Academy of Europe
 * 2020: ERC Starting Grant of the European Research Council
 * 2018: Selected by the Focus magazine as one of 25 young innovators who will shape Germany in the next 25 years
 * 2016 & 2017: Dollwet Foundation Award
 * 2016: Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
 * 2011 – 2013: Computational Sciences fellowship by the Volkswagen Foundation
 * 2004 – 2006: Fellow of the German National Merit Foundation
 * 2001: Award of the Membership in the German Physical Society