About me
Hi, I’m Moritz. Originally from Germany, I studied Neurobiology in Nijmegen and got interested in neurodevelopmental disorders. For my PhD at the Donders Institute and Radboudumc University Hospital in Nijmegen, I investigated the development of inhibitory (GABAergic) neurons in a mouse model for Kleefstra Syndrome, under the guidance of Nael Nadif Kasri and Dirk Schubert.
During this time, I got interested in tissue clearing, a technique that allows us to make the entire brain transparent and scan it all at once. I kept working with tissue clearing as a staff scientist at the Helmholtz Institute in Munich for 2.5 years, in the lab of Ali Ertürk, where I specialized in deep-learning analysis of transparent-brain image data and kept the microscopes running. Since 2024 I have returned to Nijmegen as part of the SCANNER consortium. Now in the labs of Corette Wierenga at the Radboud University and Nael Nadif Kasri at the Radboudumc, I will be applying my transparent-brain analysis skills to scan for sex-specific differences in the brains of many mouse models of Autism Spectrum Disorder. I hope that this will point us to new and previously overlooked regions of the brain, which we can then characterize in detail.
