ABOUT SUSANNE
ABOUT ME
I am interested in how animals perceive, navigate and communicate in their natural environment, and which neuronal circuits and cognitive processes underlie these behaviors. In this sense, bats are fascinating animals as they use their auditory and vocal system both for actively sensing their environment and for social communication through a rich vocal repertoire. Personally, I have always been in awe of these flying mammals, and I am delighted to work with them in my research.
After a bachelor in Biology and a master in Neuroscience, I obtained a PhD at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where I studied the network of prefrontal cortex and hippocampus in spatial working memory and navigation in mice using optogenetics and electrophysiology. While training and testing mice on several behavioral tasks, I became increasingly interested in the natural relevance of these behaviors and how the underlying brain circuitry has been shaped by the ecological niche of a species. I therefore shifted my focus more towards the field of Neuroethology and started a postdoc in the Brain & Behavior group, where I now study bat vocalizations and their neuronal correlates.
ABOUT MY PROJECT
In my main project, I will focus on the interaction of bats and how neuronal activity in auditory and motor areas coordinates these interactions. It has been shown in several species that brain oscillations synchronize between individuals during social engagement, presumably to coordinate behavior and to prevent temporal overlap. But little is known about how the neuronal network keeps track of the conspecifics’ behavior, such as their vocalizations, and how this information is integrated to control and coordinate an individual’s own actions. To study these questions, I plan to record neuronal activity in the cortex and striatum of two bats engaging in vocal exchangeS, while monitoring their calls and their facial movements. I then want to extend these experiments to look at several forms of social interaction and navigation in freely moving bats and how the underlying neuronal activity compares across different bat species.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
1- Brian P. Rummell, Solmaz Bikas, Susanne S. Babl, Joseph A. Gogos, Torfi Sigurdsson. Altered corollary discharge signaling in the auditory cortex of a mouse model of schizophrenia predisposition. 2023, Nature Communications 14, 7388. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42964-2
2- Joeri B. G. van Wijngaarden, Susanne S. Babl, Hiroshi T. Ito. Entorhinal-retrosplenial circuits for allocentric-egocentric transformation of boundary coding. 2020, eLife 9:e59816. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.59816
3- Susanne S. Babl, Brian P. Rummell, Torfi Sigurdsson. The spatial extent of optogenetic silencing in transgenic mice expressing channelrhodopsin in inhibitory interneurons. 2019, Cell Reports, 29(5), 1381‑1395.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2019.09.049