Alexander Borst


Alexander "Axel" Borst is a German neurobiologist. He is director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology and head of the department Circuits - Computation - Models.
Alexander Borst studied biology at the University of Würzburg, where he obtained his PhD as a member of Martin Heisenberg's group. He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. Afterwards, he led an Independent Junior Research Group at the Friedrich-Miescher-Laboratory of the Max Planck Society. He was professor the University of California, Berkeley. In 2001, he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
Alexander Borst is member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the European Molecular Biology Organization. Among others, he received the Research Award of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies 2014 and the Valentino Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience 2014.

Scientific focus

Alexander Borst's scientific research is focused on the foundations of information processing and neural circuits in the fly brain.
Alexander Borst's work led to a number of scientific findings. Among these were the discoveries that