Dr. Yannis Spyropoulos, Researcher at the IMS, earned a highly competitive ERC Starting Grant.ERC Starting Grants are awarded to early-career researchers of any nationality with two to sevenyears of experience since completion of the PhD (or equivalent degree) and a scientific track recordshowing great promise. This grant is a funding scheme that supports young talented research leaders to gain independence and build their own research team in Europe.

FORTH Researcher Panagiota Poirazi has been awarded an Einstein Visiting Fellowship to investigate neuronal mechanisms of behavioral flexibilityDr. Panayiota Poirazi, a Research Director at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of FORTH, is the recipient of a prestigious Einstein Visiting Fellowship of the Einstein Foundation Berlin.

Researchers at IMBB-FORTH challenge the dogma that wants interneurons to be “simple”.Computational modeling in the Poirazi lab (www.dendrites.gr) at IMBB-FORTH (www.imbb.forth.gr) shed new light on how Fast Spiking Basket Cells – a central subtype of GABAergic inhibitory neurons- integrate their incoming signals, taking advantage of their recently discovered dendritic non-linearities. The article, entitled: “Challenging the point neuron dogma: FS basket cells as 2-stage nonlinear integrators” authored by IMBB researchers Alexandra Tzilivaki, George Kastellakis and Panayiota Poirazi was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

The second ERC Proof of Concept Grant for the INSPIRE Group, ICS-FORTHAssociate Professor Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, Affiliated Researcher to ICS-FORTH, ERC Starting Grant holder, and his team, the INSPIRE research group, were awarded their second ERC Proof of Concept grant for the RAVEN project. The ERC Proof of Concept Grants aim to maximize the value of the excellent research already supported by ERC, by funding further work (i.e., activities which were not scheduled to be funded by the original ERC frontier research grant) in order to explore the innovation potential of ideas arising from these projects. Proof of Concept Grants are therefore on offer only to Principal Investigators whose proposals draw substantially on their ERC funded research.