Constance Scharff

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Constance Scharff (born August 13, 1959 ) is a German zoologist and neuro and behavioral biologist. She is a university professor at the Free University of Berlin .

Life

Scharff obtained her Abitur in Lübeck and studied biology at the University of Marburg from 1979. From 1982 she studied at Adelphi University, where she turned to experimental neurobiology and behavioral research with Carol Diakow. From 1984 she became a doctoral student with Fernando Nottebohm at Rockefeller University, who first demonstrated, using the example of learning to sing birds, that adults also form new neurons when they learn. In 1991 she received her doctorate from Nottebohm and went to Paris as a post-doctoral student to the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Embryology (College de France), where she dealt with gender differences in the brains of chickens, and then again to Nottebohm at Rockefeller University in New York, where she became Assistant Professor in 1994. From 2001 she was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin before becoming Professor of Behavioral Biology at the Free University of Berlin in 2005.

plant

In experiments at Nottebohm in New York, she was able to prove that nerve cells in the motor area (RA) of the song center (HVC) of birds could be regenerated after selective destruction (even three times more nerve cells were formed than before), but not in the area that was in the brain area X is projected (this is fixed from birth and controls the learning of singing).

She researches bird song, including how it is learned, stored in the bird's brain and how birds communicate with it. Nightingales also serve as objects of study for her group while birds are singing.

She was involved in deciphering the zebra finch genome. In collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, they found that the avian brain actively uses more than half of the avian genome (around 10,000 genes). A gene that is important for learning to sing (FOXP2) is also the cause of a human hereditary disease that leads to speech disorders. The study of the neurobiology of bird song is thus also linked to that of language acquisition in humans and can possibly serve as a model.

In 2007/08 she was President of the German Zoological Society . In 2012 she became a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences . In 2019 Constance Scharff was accepted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology section .

Private

She is married to the microbiologist Arturo Zychlinsky and has two daughters.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ WC Warren et al. a., Nature, Volume 464, 2010, pp. 757-762. She is a co-author there.
  2. ↑ Prof. Ph.D. Constance Scharff. Member entry at Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on February 26, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Scharff, Constance
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ornithologist, behavioral scientist and neurobiologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 13, 1959