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Stay up to date with the latest research findings, lab events, and announcements from our team.

The Core Unit for Research Data Management enters another 3-year funding period

Grant

July 2026

The Core Unit for Research Data Management enters another 3-year funding period

The Medical Faculty and the Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research (IZKF) continue to support the Core Unit for Research Data Management (cRDM). Lead by Prof. Katrin Heinze and Prof. Philip Tovote, the cRDM will help researchers of the Medical Faculty with all their needs around research data management. The cRDM supports data management within research networks and data-intensive projects. Its goal is to enable researchers to use data efficiently, foster collaboration, and advance scientific discoveries in this field. In doing so, the cRDM promotes the FAIR principles for scientific data management: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. A key objective of the Core Unit is to develop, together with the IT departments of UKW and JMU a Virtual Research Campus (VRC)—a data management and analysis platform that integrates seamlessly into the university’s and hospital’s IT environments. The VRC is designed to enable researchers to support the full data life cycle from acquisition to primary exploitation, re-usage and storage. In the next funding period, the focus will be on expanding capacity, integrating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Persistent Identifiers (PID), as well as further developing individual VRC components and merging them into seamlessly integrated data management platforms. In this way, cRDM lays the foundation for sustainable, networked, and transparent biomedical research—and makes a significant contribution to the digitalization, quality improvement, and long-term research strategy of the Würzburg Medical Faculty.

Philip Tovote takes over as director of the Institute of Clinical Neurobiology

Staff

Oct 2025

Philip Tovote takes over as director of the Institute of Clinical Neurobiology

Philip Tovote is taking over as director of the Institute of Clinical Neurobiology from the Institute's founder, Michael Sendtner. Philip Tovote served as co-director of the institute since 2017. He also holds the chair for Systems Neurobiology at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, and heads the Defense Circuits Lab at the Würzburg University Hospital. Philip Tovote initially studied zoology in Göttingen and later specialized in neuroscience. After he did his PhD on emotion regulation at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine, he spent 4 years at the University of Hawai'i in Honolulu, where he worked with Caroline and Bob Blanchard and became an expert in rodent behavior. He then moved back to Europe for a PostDoc at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, in the lab of Andreas Lüthi. With his research during this time, he established himself as an expert in the study of neural networks that control fear and anxiety. Today, he is involved in several national and international research consortia and is particularly active in translational neuroscience, which aims to apply findings from basic research to medical applications. His research focuses on how the brain generates basic emotions such as anxiety and fear. In particular, he investigates the neural circuits that process threats and trigger corresponding physical and behavioral responses. Taking a more holistic approach towards understanding the underpinnings of defensiveness, his research focuses on interactions between the brain and the cardiovascular system as crucial determinants of emotional states.

ResolvePAIN enters second funding period

Grant

Dec 2024

ResolvePAIN enters second funding period

The DFG has renewed funding for the Clinical Research Group KFO 5001, providing over €8 million to support its work for another four years. The DCL will participate with a project on periaqueductal grey circuit processes during pain resolution. Chronic pain is thought to be related to changes in certain brain pathways, particularly in a region of the brainstem called the periaqueductal gray (PAG). However, exactly how these changes contribute to pain is still not fully known. In our project for ResolvePAIN, we combine advanced brain imaging and optogenetics with electrocardiac recordings in mice to better understand how PAG circuits influence both short-term and long-lasting pain. We are especially interested in how pain is shaped by social factors and by learning processes, and how these influences affect the way pain is experienced and reduced. Overall, this work aims to clarify how brainstem circuits help regulate and resolve pain..