Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel

stiefel@oist.jp

+81-98-921-2102

I got my undergraduate degree (Magister rer. nat.) in microbiology from the University of Vienna in 1998. During my undergraduate time I spent one year as an exchange student at the University of San Diego, California and did a research internship at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. My undergraduate thesis work (on cold-shock in E.coli) I did at the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics of the University of Vienna.

My Doctorate work I did with Wolf Singer at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. My degree, in zoology, was granted by the University of Vienna, with Friedrich Barth as the head of my thesis comity.

I then did a post-doc with Terry Sejnowski at his Computational Neurobiology Lab at the Salk Institute.

In November 2006 I joined the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology as the principal investigator of the Theoretical and Experimental Neurobiology Unit. My research interests are the computational capabilities of single neurons, with a focus on neuronal excitability and dendritic signal integration. I am using both experimental and theoretical approaches, for more information please go to my lab's web site.

I can communicate with fellow humans in English, German, Austrian and hopefully soon in Japanese, and with computers in LabView, Mathematica, NEURON (hoc and mod), Basic & LISP (from back in the days) and by yelling at them really loudly & punching the keyboard.

Publications:

Stiefel KM, Wespatat V, Singer W, Tennigkeit F.
A computational model of the interaction of membrane potential oscillations with inhibitory synaptic input in cortical cells. Neurocomputing 2001; 38-40: 389-395

Schmidt H, Stiefel KM, Racay P, Schwaller B, Eilers J.
Mutational analysis of dendritic Ca2+ kinetics in rodent Purkinje cells: role of parvalbumin and calbindin D28k. J Physiology 2003 Aug 15; 551 (1): 13-32.

Stiefel KM, Tennigkeit F, Singer W.
Synaptic plasticity in the absence of backpropagating spikes of layer II inputs to layer V pyramidal cells in rat visual cortex. European J Neuroscience 2005 May; 21 (9): 2605-10.

Stiefel KM, Wespatat V, Tennigkeit F, Singer W.
Phase Dependent Sign Changes of GABAergic Synaptic Input Explored In-Silicio and In-Vitro.
J Comput. Neuroscience 2005 Aug; 19 (1): 71-85.

Stiefel, KM, Sejnowski, TJ
Mapping Function onto Neuronal Morphology.
J Neurophysiology, 2007 Jul;98(1):513-26.

Englitz B, Stiefel, KM, Sejnowski, TJ
Irregular Firing of Isolated Cortical Interneurons in vitro Driven by Intrinsic Stochastic Mechanisms.
Neural Computation, 2008 Jan;20(1):44-64.

Chen E, Stiefel KM, Sejnowski TJ, Bullock TH.
Model of traveling waves in a coral nerve network.
J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol. 2008 Feb;194(2):195-200.