Katrin Franke is a senior research scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine and a research group leader at the Institute for Ophthalmic Research in Tübingen, Germany. Her research combines systems neuroscience, computational modeling and machine learning to understand how neural circuits in the retina and cortex process visual information.
Before joining Stanford, Franke led an independent research group at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Tübingen, where she investigated how retinal and cortical networks enable robust visual perception. Her work has been recognized with several awards, including an ERC Starting Grant (2023), the Schilling Award of the German Neuroscience Society (2021), and membership in the EMBO Young Investigator Programme (2022).
Franke earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience at the International Max Planck Research School and the University of Tübingen (summa cum laude).