I was born in Würzburg on February 23^rd 1971 as the first son of a German father and a Swedish mother. I grew up bilingually.
After 4 years of elementary school I started at the Wirsberg-Gymnasium Würzburg in 1981.
During 1987-89 I participated in two partnership programs: one with Apollo-Ridge High School Spring Church / Pennsylvania (USA) and one with our partner-school Lyc�e Joffre in Montpellier, France.
I passed the "Abitur" at the Wirsberg-Gymnasium Würzburg in 1990. My compulsory one-year-project (Facharbeit) was about the ultimate and proximate causations of homing behavior in salmon. (PDF in German)


After I was forced to waste a year in the German army, I finally started studying biology at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in November 1991.

I was able to gather some research experience in my undergraduate projects:

• From August 1 to September 11 1993, I worked on a research project at the Department of Animal Ecology of the University of Umeå, Sweden. Our topic was population ecology and environmental biology, more specifically, we traveled around in northern Sweden to study the "Effects of flow regulation, habitat area and isolation on the macroinvertebrate fauna of rapids in north Swedish rivers" (Regulated Rivers: Research & Management (1996), Vol. 12, 433-445).
• During the German winter-term 1993/94 I took two courses at the University of Umeå, Sweden. The first was called "Population Genetics and Evolutionary Ecology" and comprised statistics, quantitative genetics, behavioral ecology, life history strategies, game theory, and so forth. The second course was all about plant physiology: photosynthesis, respiration, water transport, plant hormones, winter adaptation, etc.
• From August 1 to September 15 1994 I worked at the field station of the University of Glasgow at Rowardennan in Scotland. I joined the Fish Behavior and Ecology group of the Division of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology in the Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences, to study the behavioral ecology of juvenile atlantic salmon in an artificial stream tank.
• I also worked with Zebrafish (Danio rerio) at the Department of Zoology I and did molecular biology on the methylation status of the Xmrk onkogene in Xiphophorus at the Department of Physiological Chemistry I, at the Biocenter Würzburg.
• From September 1995 to August 1996 I worked on my Diploma thesis (HTML/PDF).
  

I graduated from Biology in 1996 and until the end of March 2000 I continued research about learning and memory in Drosophila at the Department of Genetics at the Biocenter in Würzburg.

---

From august 24^th to September 1^st 1997 I participated in the Social Science Research Council workshop "Behavioral Organization in Animals", held at Bodega Marine Laboratory, University of California (Davis) and funded by the German-American Academic Council. You can have a look at our program.

---

11-13 September 1998: Together with Roman Ernst, Stefan Just and Christoph Kleineidam I participated in organizing a workshop for PhD students in neurobiology held in the Biocenter Würzburg: "9. Neurobiologischer Doktoranden Workshop". Besides minor short-term organizational chores, my responsibility was to take care of registration and information by constructing a website with online registration capabilities. I did so by modifying a guestbook cgi-script to meet our requirements. I also collected the submitted abstracts to produce the "program & abstracts" booklet, which is available for download in PDF-format.

---

From August 16 to 29 1999 I participated in the advanced course "Mouse Transgenics and Behavior" sponsored by EMBO and FENS, held at the Centre for Neuroscience in Edinburgh, Scotland. The course's website was compiled from course material and designed by me.

---

I completed my PhD thesis (PDF/HTML) on January 17, 2000 and defended it on March 22, 2000.


From April 2000 to November 2003 I worked as a PostDoc in John Byrne's lab in Houston, Texas (USA). I studied the operant vs. classical conditioning dichotomy in Aplysia using electrophysiology and neuronal net computation (see the learning and memory section on my brembs.net website).

---

On April 5, 2000 I accepted an invitation by Academic Press to write an article about 'Hamilton's theory' for their Encyclopedia of Genetics.

---

May 4, 2001: I was asked by the Fernuniversität Hagen (Germany) to contribute the Learning and Memory section of my brembs.net website to an educational CD for their introductory psychology course.

---

September 14, 2001: The German science foundation ( Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) has awarded me the Emmy-Noether fellowship.

---

May 9, 2002: I accepted the offer by the new journal 'Evolutionary Psychology' to join their editorial board.

---

February, 2003: I accepted two invitations for reviews on operant conditioning, one from "Current Directions in Psychological Science' and one from 'Current Opinion in Neurobiology'. See Downloads.


In November/December 2003 I moved to Berlin to work independently at the Institute for Neurobiology at the Freie Universität Berlin.

---

On March 18^th, 2004 the DFG awarded me my own Drosophila lab and funding for three years.

---

19/07/2004-23/07/2004 Invited discussant at the Novartis Foundation Symposium No.268 on "Molecular Mechanisms Influencing Aggressive Behaviours". The proceedings of the symposium have been published in this book.

---

On December 10^th, 2005 the DFG awarded me a 2-year research grant on "The neural basis of operant conditioning in Aplysia".

---

17/09/2006-22/09/2006: Invited speaker for the XIII Summer School organized by the Nicolàs Cabrera Institute in Madrid, Spain. I talked about "Brains as Output/Input Devices" and " Operant conditioning in Aplysia". The school was held at the "Residencia La Cristalera" in Miraflores de la Sierra and the topic of this year's school was "Biophysics of Biological Circuits: from Molecules to Networks".

---

November 20, 2006: I accepted an offer by PLoS ONE to join their editorial board.

---

13/03/2007-15/03/2007: Invited presentation on "Brains as Output/Input Systems" at the Janelia Farm Conference: “Insect Behavior: Small Brains, Big Functions” taking place at the Janelia Farm Research Campus.

---

05/06/2007-09/06/2007: Invited presentation at the "Gastropod Neuroscience: Past Successes and Future Prospects.” to be held at University of Washington, Friday Harbor Labs, San Juan Island, USA. I will speak about the potential of " Aplysia as an attractive alternative for analyzing agency?"

---

12/07/2008-16/07/2008: Organizer Symposium “The neurobiology of choice and decision-making” (with Bernard Balleine), FENS Forum 2008, Geneva, Switzerland