Silvia Arber

Silvia Arber currently holds a joint appointment as a tenured Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and is senior investigator at the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland. Silvia Arber obtained her Ph.D. at in the research group of Pico Caroni at the FMI in Basel, Switzerland in 1996, for her studies on activity-regulated signaling processes at the neuromuscular junction. She subsequently moved to the laboratory of Thomas Jessell at Columbia University in New York for her postdoctoral work from 1996 to 2000 where she worked on the role of transcription factors in neuronal differentiation in the spinal cord. In particular, she initiated studies on genetic programs controlling sensory-motor connectivity. She subsequently continued and extended these studies in her own laboratory in Basel, Switzerland, starting as an Assistant Professor in the year 2000. Silvia Arber has received a numerous awards, including the Pfizer award for part of her Ph.D. work, the HFSP 10th anniversary award for young investigators while she was a postdoctoral fellow, the Latsis award and Schellenberg award for research on spinal cord development, plasticity and regeneration. Moreover, Silvia Arber also acts on the Editorial Board of a number of Journals and is a receiving editor for the European Journal of Neuroscience. The main focus of her current studies is to understand the logic underlying the precision with which neuronal circuits are assembled during development.