We warmly congratulate our CRC 1436 project leader Dr. Anne Petzold from subproject A09 “Memory Resources of the Mammillary Body” on receiving the prestigious Emmy Noether Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The DFG will fund her research on the role of leptin in behavioral control with EUR 2.1 million.
Picture: S. Kimmel
Around a third of the population in Germany suffers from a mental disorder such as eating disorders and depression. Depression alone accounts for around 8 mio cases, and new treatments are urgently needed. Leptin—a hormone made by body fat—may help to improve social and emotional wellbeing in people with depression, but its signaling pathways in the brain and its therapeutic way of action is not yet clear. Dr. Petzold will now build on her earlier work which identified specific brain cells that respond to leptin and may influence social and sexual behavior. The team will now map these brain circuits, explore how they differ between the sexes and hormonal cycles, and test whether boosting leptin can improve social and sexual wellbeing under both healthy and pathological conditions.
Anne Petzold has been part of the Collaborative Research Center 1436 since January 1, 2025, and leads the research group ‘Brain-body interactions’ at the European Neuroscience Institute (ENI) in Göttingen. Her work aims to uncover how peripheral signals from the body inform subcortical brain networks to modulate essential innate behaviors according to physiological needs and environmental conditions. Anne Petzold’s team uses single-photon microendoscopy to study brain activity in freely moving animals and targeted manipulations of specific cell types to identify and understand the neural networks for behavior control.
Congratulations, Anne!