Abstract

Gero Miesenböck is Waynflete Professor of Physiology and founding Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford. A native of Austria, Gero studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck and was a postdoctoral fellow with James Rothman. Before coming to Oxford in 2007, he held faculty appointments at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Yale University School of Medicine.

Gero has received many awards for the invention of optogenetics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the German and Austrian Academies of Science.

His lecture, entitled “Light Sleep,” will illustrate the enabling power of optogenetics with recent work on the homeostatic regulation of sleep. Optogenetic interventions have helped to pinpoint neurons whose sleep-inducing activity switches on as sleep deficits accrue, reveal how this activity switch works, and furnish a molecular interpretation of sleep pressure, its accumulation, and its discharge.