About Gero Miesenböck
Gero Andreas Miesenböck is an Austrian scientist. He is currently Waynflete Professor of Physiology and Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (CNCB) at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2012 Miesenböck was awarded the InBev-Baillet Latour International Health Prize for "pioneering optogenetic approaches to manipulate neuronal activity and to control animal behaviour". He discovered that sleep-inducing neurons estimate sleep need by monitoring the flow of electrons through their mitochondria. Miesenböck used similar genetic modifications to breed animals whose brains contained light-responsive nerve cells integrated into their circuitry, and was the first to demonstrate that the behavior of these animals could be remote-controlled.
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