Helmholtz Doctoral Prize
November 6, 2019: Miriam received the Doctoral Prize of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers in the research field Key Technologies.
The Helmholtz Association awards the prize for early-career scientists that reached outstanding achievements during their doctoral phase.
Miriam developed in her PhD thesis various methods that enable a more precise reconstruction of nerve fiber pathways in the brain. By performing simulations on supercomputers, she could show for example that light scattering contains valuable additional information. Light scattering occurs when light deviates from its straight trajectory while passing through brain tissue. She found that even complex nerve fiber constellations can be reconstructed by studying the respective scattering patterns, for example crossing fibers that lie on top of each other. Moreover, she discovered a hitherto undescribed effect of light attenuation that depends on the direction of oscillation of the light and that provides additional information about certain brain tissue properties.