His passion has brought about an outstanding PhD thesis “Perception & the cognitive map: deriving a stable world from visual inputs” for which he has now been awarded the prestigious Otto Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society. Below, you can read Matthias Nau’s own words on his research and motivation.

What motivates you in your research?

“I am fascinated by how our brain combines vision and memory to form an internal image of the external world.

As a cognitive neuroscientist, I work at the intriguing intersection between biology, psychology, computer science, medicine, physics and philosophy. I have the huge privilege of learning something new about all these fields on a daily basis, and to gain in-depth insights into human brain function. Not only does this type of research generate new knowledge and the basis for medical applications, but it actively shapes the very understanding of ourselves as humans in this world. Motivation comes naturally.”

What questions would you like to answer by your research?

“Our memories are the building blocks of our imagination. Each time we recall our past, plan our future, or imagine fictitious events, our brain recombines existing memories anew. 

But how are memories formed in the first place? And how are they retrieved when needed? How does the brain even link the many sensory inputs that together define our visual experience? What role does our behaviour play in these processes? 

These are the questions I address.”

What research tools do you apply to these questions?

“I focus on spatial perception and eye movements using state-of-the-art functional neuroimaging of the human brain.”

“Receiving this award is a big honor for me”, says Nau. “It is also an award of the outstanding PhD environment that I worked in", he humbly notes. 
Matthias Nau wrote his PhD thesis at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim and was at the same time a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig.

You can read Matthias Nau’s thesis at NTNU Open

You can follow Matthias Nau’s research at his current position as a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda (USA)
 

See the announcement on Max Planck Society’s website