Denise Manahan-Vaughan

Denise Manahan-Vaughan is head of the Department of Neurophysiology, Dean of Studies and Director of the International Graduate School of Neuroscience and Chair of the Research Department of Neuroscience of the Ruhr University Bochum. She was a member of the Executive Committee and Governing Council of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, and Chairperson of the Network of European Neuroscience Schools in the period encompassing 2005-2010. From 2005 through 2010, she was also speaker of the Competence Network for Neuroscience of the German Federal State of Northrhine Westphalia (NeuroNRW). Currently, she is speaker of the Collaborative Research Consortium on Integration and Representation of Sensory Processes (SFB 874) that is funded by the German Research Foundation.
A native of Rathgar in Dublin, Ireland, she studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, graduating with an honours degree, specialising in Physiology in 1988. She completed a PhD in Neuropharmacology in 1992. In the mid 1990s she moved to Germany, working first as a research scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, and completing a Habilitation degree in Physiology at the Otto von Guericke University in 1998.
She became associate Professor of Physiology at the Johannes Müller Institute for Physiology at the Charite in Berlin where she established the Synaptic Plasticity Research Group. In 2003, she became Professor of Neuroscience at the Ruhr University Bochum, where she was head of the Learning and Memory Research Unit. At this time she also became Dean of Studies and Director of the International Graduate School of Neuroscience.
In January 2008 she became Chair of the Department of Experimental Neurophysiology and in October 2010, Chair of the Department of Neurophysiology, within the Medical Faculty, of the Ruhr University Bochum.
Her research focusses on characterising the role that synaptic plasticity plays in declarative memory formation in the mammalian brain. She has produced over 100 international scientific publications on the area of hippocampal function. Her findings with regard to the role of hippocampal long-term depression in memory processing (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 96(15):8739-44; Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 101(21):8192-7) have contributed to a revised understanding as to how synaptic plasticity may contribute to information encoding and memory.
She is a niece of the renowned Irish actress, Anna Manahan and of Irish civil servant Michael Manahan.