Prof. Dr. Richard Hahnloser

Since March 1st 2007, Richard Hans Robert Hahnloser is a Full Professor for Systems Neurosciences at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, affiliated with the University and the ETH Zurich. His research interests are the neural principles underlying vocal learning and imitation in songbirds. Using a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches, he studies the signal processing in auditory and motor cells of the song system, as well as the regularities of their synaptic connections. His work aims at decoding the neural networks of the song system and to understand the structural and functional plasticity of these networks to environmental influences.

Richard Hahnloser was born in 1972 in Zurich and studied physics at the ETH in Lausanne and Zurich. In 1996, he earned a diploma in physics from the ETH Zurich, and in 1999 he obtained a Ph.D from the same institution, for which he was awarded an ETH medal. Subsequently, he spent 5 years as a postdoctoral researcher in the USA, working at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (MIT), at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. Since 2004, Richard Hahnloser has worked as a Professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University / ETH Zurich.