Andi is joining IST Austria as a TWIST fellowship.

Andi will be driving force behind pushing our all-optical drug screening programs for GPCRs and RTKs to the next level!

Welcome to IST and good luck!

The symposium “Deciphering dopamine function with new tools: from molecule to synapse and behavior” that is organized by Xin Jin from the Salk Institute and Harald is coming up at Dopamine 2016!

Join us Wednesday, September 7, 2016, 10:30 – 12:10 at Dopamine 16 in Vienna! You can find the program of Dopamine 2016 and the symposium here (search the page for “deciphering dopamine function” to find the symposium).

The complete group will join the 8th annual ÖGMBT meeting in Graz from September 12th-September 14th.

Inma and Steffi will be giving talks about their current projects.Eva, Catherine, Laura and Alvaro will present posters. Check out the program of the meeting here http://xn--gmbt4qa.at/jahrestagung/programm

Hope to see you there.

Congratulations to Eva! Eva received a Travel Grant for the 12th International Congress of Cell Biology! Eva will also be giving a talk at the conference, which takes place in Prague from July 21st – 25th, 2016. Check out the congress webpage: http://www.iccb2016.org/

Yesterday saw the end of the first EMBO Practical Course on Optogenetics! I just wanted to briefly thank the other organizers, speakers and instructors and all participants for this wonderful experience! I also wanted to thank EMBO for selecting and funding our proposal, and to the entire local team Jackie, Diah and Yvonne for their help and for the awesome atmosphere they created. I wrote a course summary (this is my personal summary) and uploaded it here; it is called the “The Three Ms of a successful PhD in/using optogenetics”! I hope to see all of you soon again! Harald

It is time to say goodbye to Maurizio who defended his thesis this week!

We (and the rest of the institute! and the sales representative of Promega! and all shareholders of Promega!) are truly sad to see your project end and see you move on!

We wish you all the best for your future!

arrivederci! and grazille mille! for many memories!

Congrats to Eva, who lead our project on red light-induced dimerization and activation of membrane receptors!

Our paper just appeared in Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed.!

You can find it here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201601736/full

News coverage can be found here (and will be updated as we go):

• Phys.Org
• Tiroler Tageszeitung
• ScienceDaily
• APA Science
• der Standard
• IST Austria

Together with Stefano de Renzis (EMBL) and Jared Toettcher (Princeton) we are organizing the EMBO Practical Course “Non-Neuronal Optogenetics: From Design to Application in Cell Signaling and Tissue Morphogenesis”!

Visit the course website at: http://www.embl.de/training/events/2016/OPT16-01/

We have a truly amazing set of speakers/trainers and registration is now open!

Apply to join us at the end of May / early June in Heidelberg!