Volkswagen Foundation to provide more than 1.1 million euros of funding for neurobiology research project at Freie Universität Berlin
№ 121/2025 from Jul 16, 2025
Neurobiologist Professor Peter Robin Hiesinger from Freie Universität Berlin will be receiving more than 1.12 million euros in funding from the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the “Pioneering Research – Exploring the Unknown Unknown” funding program. Hiesinger’s interdisciplinary project, “The Information Content of Brain Wiring,” will be based at Freie Universität’s Institute of Biology and run for a period of five years, beginning in January 2026. The Pioneering Research program supports groundbreaking and risky research ideas with high scientific relevance.
The aim of the project “The Information Content of Brain Wiring” is to assess how difficult (or impossible) it is to measure the information content of a brain – i.e., the size of a hard drive it would take to store all the information contained within the brain’s structure. To simplify the task, they chose the brain of the fruit fly (Drosophila) to examine what information would be required to upload or download the brain’s information content. This uploading and downloading is possible for artificial neural networks that underlie virtually all artificial intelligence systems to date. However, this is not the case for biological neural networks, where it is still unknown how information is actually stored.
“What would we have to measure or count to determine the information content of a brain?” asks project lead Peter Robin Hiesinger. “As of yet, we do not know. It is precisely this question that makes our project so exciting – and the funding from the Volkswagen Foundation will give us the opportunity to finally address it.”
The team of researchers will be following an experimental approach to quantitatively assess the information content of brain wiring in Drosophila. First, they will establish “lower boundaries” of information content based on quantitative descriptions that make use of complete connectome data as well as live dynamic measurements performed in their lab. In the second stage, they will use compression algorithms and reconstructions of genome-driven developmental transformations created using live imaging data to investigate how “deep” or “simple” the flies’ brains are in terms of their ability to compress information.
This interdisciplinary approach has been designed to provide a quantitative, information theory-based link between neurobiology and artificial intelligence, with relevance for both fields and the public debate. Hiesinger and his team hope to achieve new insights into the field of neurobiology and contribute toward current discussions surrounding biological versus artificial intelligence.
Comprehensive Funding and Open-Access Publications
The funding provided by the Volkswagen Foundation will cover personnel costs, travel costs, and material costs, as well as publication fees and measures to promote equal opportunities. A central goal of the project is to make the results publicly available to all. The researchers will publish their findings as open-access articles and provide long-term, free access to their data sets and software solutions.
More Funding Success with the German Research Foundation
Hiesinger’s team recently received confirmation of another grant that will complement their research. The German Research Foundation (DFG) approved 400,000 euros’ worth of funding for an additional postdoctoral project to study genome-driven circuit development with a view to informing future electrical circuitry applications. Titled “A Bio-Inspired Electrical Engineering Approach to Circuit Development,” this complementary project will use the insights gained from modeling the growth of a Drosophila neural network and generate relevant applications in the field of technology.
Promoting Brain Science in Brain City
Both projects are a credit to Freie Universität Berlin’s reputation as an important research institution at the intersection of biology, neuroscience, computer science, and electrical engineering. They are part of a wider, global research effort to better understand neuronal structures and how they develop.
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