I like the smell of that

We are proud to present a new paper in our series on the rela­tion­ship of smell (per­cep­tion) and obe­si­ty. Maria Poes­sel and col­leagues explore how meta­bol­ic health sta­tus, in par­tic­u­lar insulin resis­tance, may play a key role in the altered per­cep­tion of smell across a large sam­ple of peo­ple with...

Congratulations Dr. Meemken

On 23rd of July, we had the plea­sure of cel­e­brat­ing with Marie Meemken who suc­cess­ful­ly defend­ed her PhD the­sis on implic­it and explic­it appet­i­tive out­come learn­ing in obe­si­ty. We at the O’BRAIN Lab are very proud to see anoth­er female sci­en­tist emerge from our midst! Well done, Marie!

Testing resumes in Leipzig

After months of lock­down and social dis­tanc­ing the team in Leipzig is back at the MPI and test­ing. An exten­sive cat­aloque of hygiene mea­sures has been devel­oped to pro­tect both par­tic­i­pants and staff dur­ing exper­i­ments. Whilst not all meth­ods can be used yet, the O’BRAIN Lab has already test­ed a...

The O’BRAIN Lab in times of Corona

Life at the O’BRAIN Lab is begin­ning to return to nor­mal — staff in Leipzig were wel­comed back to the office (in small num­bers), while work­ing from home con­tin­ues in Helsin­ki, with an exit strat­e­gy being pre­pared. We tried to make the best of social dis­tanc­ing while in lock­down and...

Corona in Europe

Like almost all coun­tries all over the world Ger­many and Fin­land have been fac­ing the COVID 19/Corona cri­sis since late Feb­ru­ary and ear­ly March. In an unprece­dent­ed move, both the Uni­ver­si­ty of Helsin­ki as well as the MPI in Leipzig, went vir­tu­al as pre­emp­tive mea­sures. All staff, incl. the entire...

Leipzig Research Festival

The O’BRAIN Lab pre­sent­ed a whoop­ing 4 posters at the 16th Leipzig Research Fes­ti­val of Life Sci­ences at the end of Jan­u­ary, with top­ics rang­ing from neur­al respons­es to food odors in obe­si­ty to diet-asso­ci­at­ed dif­fer­ences in periph­er­al dopamine pre­cur­sors. Many thanks to the pre­sent­ing O’BRAIN researchers Maria Poes­sel, Franzi...

Welcome Daniel

What an excel­lent start to the new decade! We now have our first PhD stu­dent in Helsin­ki! Daniel joins us from Nijmegen where he spent a few years work­ing in indus­try before return­ing to Scan­di­navia and sci­ence. In true style he was wel­comed by Annette and Suse with a selec­tion...

Last call for study participation (in German only)

Until the end of Novem­ber we are look­ing for the last male vol­un­teers (Ger­man only) to com­plete our study on the influ­ence of fat and sug­ar on the brain. Help sci­ence and get in touch with us via 0341–9940 2629 or dopamin-diet@cbs.mpg.de. We are look­ing for­ward to wel­com­ing you!   

Welcome Minka

It’s our great plea­sure to wel­come our first Helsin­ki stu­dent to the team. Min­ka, who is a Mas­ter stu­dent of psy­chol­o­gy, will be inves­ti­gat­ing whether olfac­to­ry stim­u­la­tion influ­ences auto­mat­ic action ten­den­cies in obe­si­ty. We are very proud to have a first col­lab­o­ra­tion between our 2 labs as the data was...