We are beyond excited that our research is featured in a brand new brochure published by the Center for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg.

Established in 1987 as the first center for basic research in molecular neurobiology in Germany, the Center for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg today consists of seven institutes, nine research groups, four guest groups and seven core facilities. As an interdisciplinary research center it combines cutting edge expertise in synapse biology, neuroimmunology, neurogenetics, systems biology, systems immunology, optogenetics, cognition and development.

For an exclusive look behind the scenes of our Bassoon story see page 15. And for getting to know the lab behind the beautiful cover image check out Simon Wiegert.

I am excited to be part of the Hertie Network of Excellence in Clinical Neuroscience, which just started in June 2020 with its first symposium in Heidelberg. Thanks to the organizers for an inspiring meeting and the chance to participate remotely.

Within the network, six selected excellent research sites are initially supported for three years. The five million euros provided in the first funding period mainly support the Hertie Academy of Clinical Neuroscience, which will promote four scientific fellows per location.

In my project I will focus on viral delivery of neuroprotection against inflammation. Make sure to also checkout the other fellows from the Hertie Network Hamburg and the other sites in the Hertie Network of Excellence in Clinical Neuroscience.

The clarity and ease of use of the tidyverse ecosystem spearheaded by Hadley Wickham made it an essential tool for a whole generation of data scientists working with R. The concept of tidy data and its manipulation has proven to be so intuitive and powerful that many people, including me, would not like to miss it.

In case you have not come across the tidyverse yet, I highly recommend the free online book R for Data Science. I guess, it is save to say that this book permanently changed the way I do analysis every day.

However, if you adopted the tidyverse philosophy, you really feel the pain when you are forced to go back to data types like matrices and lists, for example when constructing gene expression heatmaps. As this is a task I am frequently confronted with, I developed the R package tidyheatmaps that allows you to easily plot complex heatmaps from tidy data. It includes straightforward formatting, annotation, clustering and scaling with just a few additional key strokes.

Finally, I want to give a really big shout-out to Raivo Kolde who developed the great pheatmap package, which is doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes of tidyheatmaps.

I am very honored to receive the Dr. Martini Prize, handed over by Hamburg Senator for Science, Research and Equality, Katharina Fegebank, for my work on immune regulation during pregnancy.

The Dr. Martini Prize is the oldest medical prize in Germany. Since 1883 it has been awarded annually on February 12, the anniversary of Erich Martini’s death. The prize is dedicated to the “promotion of young scientists” and is awarded by the Dr. Martini Foundation to scientists who work in Hamburg hospitals and are engaged in basic clinical research and new therapeutic approaches.

Jan Broder Engler is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis at the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf.

During his medical studies at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin he joined the group of Gabriela Riemekasten for T cell autoimmunity at the German Rheumatism Research Centre Berlin. He received his MD in 2010 for investigating T cell responses to a nuclear autoantigen in systemic lupus erythematosus¹.

After completing his studies in Berlin he joined the group of Manuel Friese at the Institute of Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis in Hamburg and focussed on mechanisms of pregnancy-induced immune tolerance in multiple sclerosis². While working on this topic he was involved in several immunological projects^3–5 and received his PhD in human biology in 2015.

Sparked by a workshop at the The European Bioinformatics Institute in 2014, he got fascinated by systems biology. He began to establish laboratory and computational workflows for transcriptomics, single-cell transcriptomics and epigenetics in the lab. Using these techniques, he investigated neuronal responses to inflammation and their consequence for neuronal survival^6,7. Moreover, he applied T cell receptor sequencing to characterize the suppression of multiple sclerosis by pregnancy^8,9.

Currently, Broder works on neuronal injury and develops strategies to equip neurons with countermeasures against stress and inflammation. Since 2020 he is a fellow of the Hertie Academy of Clinical Neuroscience.

For his data analyses and visualizations he strongly relies on the ecosystem around the programming language R, for which he develops open source software tools.