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Faculty

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Franz Weber, Ph.D.

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Associate Professor of Neuroscience
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Department: Neuroscience
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1f Graduate Group Affiliations 8 a
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Department of Neuroscience,
1e Chronobiology Program,
24 Perelman School of Medicine,
22 University of Pennsylvania
26 10-132 Smilow Research Center
43 3400 Civic Center Blvd, Bldg 421
Philadelphia, PA 19104
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2e Office: 215-898-0254
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Email: fweber@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
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18 Publications
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13 Education:
21 a B.Sc. 1b (Bioinformatics) c
5b Ludwig Maximilians University Munich / Technical University Munich, 2006.
 21 a M.Sc. 1a (Neurosciences) c
3d Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, 2009.
 21 8 PhD 23 (Systemic Neurosciences) c
3d Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, 2011.
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Links
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Description of Research Expertise

23 Research Interests
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aa We are interested in the neural and homeostatic mechanisms controlling REM sleep and the functional role of this brain state in emotional memories and behaviors.
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1a5 We study REM sleep and its functional roles in the mouse model. Our lab employs a wide range of methods including optogenetics, in vivo electrophysiology, calcium imaging, viral tracing and quantitative modeling to disentangle the neural and homeostatic mechanisms controlling REM sleep. We further seek to develop a circuit-based understanding of how REM sleep affects emotional behaviors in health and disease.
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10 Keywords
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9b Sleep, REM sleep, neural circuits, in vivo electrophysiology, calcium imaging, modeling, optogenetics, viral traching, Chronobiology, gene profiling
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Selected Publications

12a Chung S, Weber F, Zhong P, Tan CL, Nguyen TN, Beier KT, Hörmann N, Chang WC, Zhang Z, Do JP, Yao S: Identification of preoptic sleep neurons using retrograde labelling and gene profiling. Nature 545(7655): 477-481, May 2017.

 3a Weber F, Dan Y 71 : Circuit-based interrogation of sleep control. Nature 538(7623): 51-59, Oct 2016.

 d6 Weber F, Chung S, Beier KT, Xu M, Luo L, Dan Y: Control of REM sleep by ventral medulla GABAergic neurons. Nature 526(7573): 435-8, Oct 2015.

 eb Weber F, Machens CK: Sensory Coding, Efficiency. Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. D. Jaeger, R. Jung (eds.). Springer Press, Page: 3072-3081, Jun 2015.

 122 Joesch M, Weber F, Eichner H, Borst A: Functional specialization of parallel motion detection circuits in the fly. The Journal of Neuroscience 33(3): 902-905, Jan 2013 Notes: Joesch M and Weber F are co-first authors.

 f7 Weber F, Machens CK, Borst A: Disentangling the functional consequences of the connectivity between optic-flow processing neurons. Nature Neuroscience 15(3): 441-8, Mar 2012.

 e5 Borst A, Weber F: Neural action fields for optic flow based navigation: a simulation study of the fly lobula plate network. PloS one 6(1): e16303, Jan 2011.

 105 Weber F, Machens CK, Borst A: Spatiotemporal response properties of optic-flow processing neurons. Neuron 67(4): 629-42, Aug 2010 Notes: Evaluated by F1000, http://f1000.com/prime/5133958.

 db Weber F, Eichner H, Cuntz H, Borst A: Eigenanalysis of a Neural Network for Optic Flow Processing. New Journal of Physics 10(1): 015013, Jan 2008.

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26 Last updated: 04/11/2025
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