Dr Pascal Malkemper studied neurobiology at the University of Bochum from 2005 to 2011. He developed a strong interest in sensory biology and was fascinated by the diverse functional anatomy of the sensory organs of different species. With a passion for non-standard model organisms, he conducted his PhD thesis on the sensory biology of the red fox in Germany and the Czech Republic under the supervision of Hynek Burda. He received the renowned Fritz Frank Prize of the German Society for Mammalian Biology for his doctoral thesis. During his doctoral thesis, he became interested in mole-rats in the Burda laboratory beside his office. After graduating in 2014, Pascal received two start-up grants that allowed him to pursue independent projects on the magnetic sense of mole-rats in the Burda laboratory. In 2016, he moved to Vienna and joined the Keays Laboratory at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) to work on the molecular basis of the magnetic sense of pigeons. Since 2020, Pascal has focused again on the magnetic sense of mammals as head of the Max Planck Research Group "Neurobiology of Magnetoreception". Pascal was also recently awarded a starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC). His group aims to understand how organisms respond to electromagnetic fields and how systems of neurons detect and process them. He was appointed a Member of the ICNIRP Scientific Expert Group (SEG) in July 2024.

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Declaration of Personal Interest