Jan M. Ache, PhD

Emmy Noether Group Leader
Ache Lab for Sensorimotor Flexibility, Neurobiology and Genetics
University of Würzburg

Wurzburg, Germany  

Jan M. Ache is heading the Emmy Noether group ‘Sensorimotor Flexibility’ at the Biocenter of the University of Würzburg, Germany. Jan hails from Dortmund, Germany, and studied Biology and Neuroscience at the University of Cologne. For his Master’s thesis, he worked on insect leg biomechanics at the University of Leicester, UK, in the lab of Dr. Tom Matheson. Subsequently, he joined the Department of Biological Cybernetics, headed by Prof. Volker Dürr, to study the descending control of adaptive locomotion in stick insects during his PhD at Bielefeld University. He graduated with Summa cum laude in 2015. For his postdoc, Jan joined Dr. Gwyneth Card’s lab at the Janelia Research Campus, USA, where he investigated how behavioral flexibility is implemented in descending sensorimotor pathways in the Drosophila CNS. After finishing his postdoc in 2019, Jan accepted a junior group leader position at the University of Würzburg, where he established an independent research group at the Chair of Neurobiology and Genetics. In 2020, Jan was awarded an Emmy Noether Fellowship from the German Research Foundation, which allowed him to significantly expand his research portfolio. Jan is also a Co-PI on the NeuroNex project ‘Communication, Coordination, and Control in Neuromechanical Systems’.

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