We are pleased to welcome Dr Katja Hartwich to the Unit. Katja has joined the Dupret Group as a Research Assistant to provide specialist scientific support to the Group’s projects related to memory-guided behaviour using in vivo network recordings and anatomical techniques.

Katja graduated with a B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Marburg, Germany, and then with a M.Sc. in Animal Physiology from the University of Tübingen, Germany. She completed her doctoral studies in Biology at the Center for Brain Research, Vienna, Austria, and the MRC Anatomical Neuropharmacology Unit, University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. T. Klausberger. During her dissertation project, Katja studied how different types of GABAergic interneurons in the rat prefrontal cortex contribute to local and hippocampal network oscillations. In 2009, Katja joined the University of Oxford, where she has worked in three roles: As an MRC Career Development Fellow in Neuroscience at the MRC Anatomical Neuropharmacology Unit in the group of Prof. P. Somogyi where she investigated the activity of hippocampal interneurons during behaviour (until 2011); as a Graduate Research Assistant in Medical Sciences at the Department of Psychology in the group of Prof. J. Duncan (until 2015); and as a Research Technician in Neuroscience at the Department of Pharmacology in the group of Prof. P. Somogyi (until 2020). Katja has thus developed a broad laboratory skill-set spanning electrophysiology, anatomy, optogenetics, microscopy and behavioural analyses.