Julijana Gjorgjieva

Professor Gjorgjieva (b. 1983) conducts research in the fields of computational and theoretical neuroscience. She is interested in how brain circuits become tuned to maintain a balance between constant change as we learn new things, and robustness to produce reliable behavior. In particular, she concentrates on two aspects of neural circuit organization, looking at how it emerges from the interaction of neuronal and synaptic properties during development, and from optimality and energy conservation principles that operate over the longer timescales of evolution. For her research she has been awarded numerous prizes and grants, including an ERC Starting Grant in 2018 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2024.

Professor Gjorgjieva studied mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in California, USA. After obtaining a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in 2011, she spent five years in the USA as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and Brandeis University, supported by grants from the Swartz Foundation and the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. From 2016 until 2022, she was an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. She joined TUM as a full tenured professor in 2022 where she is faculty in the Schools of Medicine and Health and Life Sciences. She was a Scholar of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence from 2021 until 2026, and now coordinates the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Munich.