Julijana Gjorgjieva is professor of computational neuroscience at the Technical University of Munich’s School of Life Sciences. She conducts research in the fields of computational and theoretical neuroscience. She is interested in how brain circuits become tuned to maintain a balance between constant change as we learn new things, and robustness to produce reliable behavior. In particular, she concentrates on two aspects of neural circuit organization, looking at how it emerges from the interaction of neuronal and synaptic properties during development, and from optimality and energy conservation principles that operate over the longer timescales of evolution.
Gjorgjieva studied mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. After obtaining her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge in 2011, she spent five years as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and Brandeis University, supported by grants from the Swartz Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. In 2016, she set up an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and joined the Technical University of Munich as assistant professor shortly after, as part of the MaxPlanck@TUM program. She received tenure and joined the university as a full professor in 2022. She is also a member of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Munich.
