Description:

Dr. Plenz is Chief of the Section on Critical Brain Dynamics in the Intramural Research Program at the NIMH.  He attended college at the Universities of Mainz and Tuebingen, Germany. Under the supervision of Prof. Valentino Braitenberg and Ad Aertsen, he received his PhD in 1993 at the Max-Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics/University Tuebingen, where he pioneered the development of in vitro cortex networks to study the emergence of neuronal population dynamics. During his three-year postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen T. Kitai at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, he developed advanced cortex-forebrain neuronal cultures that allowed him to identify the mechanisms of distinct activity patterns that characterize normal and abnormal population dynamics in cortex and basal ganglia. Dr. Plenz joined the NIMH as a tenure-track Investigator in 1999 and was promoted to Senior Investigator with tenure in 2006. His laboratory combines electrophysiological and imaging techniques and neural modeling to study the self-organization of neuronal networks.