Dr. Ehlers conducted his doctoral and post-doctoral research at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and his undergraduate research at the California Institute of Technology. He is a compelling and experienced speaker on the topics of neurobiology, cellular signaling and molecular cell biology. In 2008, Dr. Ehlers received the Breakthrough Research Award from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. He has also been a past recipient of the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award; the John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology; and the Eppendorf and Science Prize in Neurobiology, among several other scientific achievements and accolades. He is currently a member of the American Society for Cell Biology; the Society of Neuroscience; and serves on several scientific advisory boards in North America and Europe.

As the leader of the Research Group Molecular Neurobiology at the Max Planck Florida Institute, Dr. Samuel M. Young, Jr. will study synapses – the highly specialized contact points in the brain where neurons pass electrical and chemical signals to one another. He plans on focusing on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of synaptic function. His long-term goal is to use the knowledge gained in the mechanisms of synaptic function to help uncover the causes of neurological disorders and ultimately understand how the brain operates. He begins work at the Jupiter, Fla. facility on April 1, with the rest of his research group joining in mid-May.

Dr. Young was most recently a Research Group Leader in the Department of Membrane Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. He conducted his post-doctoral work at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in the Gene Therapy Center, at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. in the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratories, and at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in the Department of Membrane Biophysics.  He carried out his doctoral work at UNC-Chapel Hill in the Gene Therapy Center and in the Curriculum in Genetics and Molecular Biology, and his undergraduate work at Princeton University. He was a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship and is currently a member of the Society for Neuroscience.             Dr. Jason Christie will head the Research Group Synapse Physiology and will focus his team on studying how cells in the brain communicate with one another. Dr. Christie will use both electrical recording and imaging methods to determine how the transfer of information between two cells or, within larger groups of cells, is altered by previous activity. This plasticity, or malleability, between brain cells affects behavior and allows the brain to respond, adapt and learn from an experience.

Dr. Christie did his doctoral and post-doctoral work at the Vollum Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon and his undergraduate work at the University of South Dakota. He will begin his work in Jupiter, Florida in June.

These new research areas complement the work already underway at the Max Planck Florida Institute under the direction of Dr. Bert Sakmann, the 1991 Nobel Laureate in Medicine. His research team is conducting a program dedicated to creating a three-dimensional map of the normal brain. They are labeling the different cell types with specific fluorescent markers and then imaging and quantifying the neuron distributions. This work will lay the foundation for future studies on brain degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's.

The Max Planck Florida Institute is currently operating in a temporary facility on Florida Atlantic University’s MacArthur Campus in Jupiter. The permanent 100,000-square-foot biomedical research center and laboratories is expected to be completed by early 2012. For more information, visit www.maxplanckflorida.org.

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