On November 30, 2015, Melitta Schachner, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, received the prestigious honorary doctorate degree from the University of Heidelberg.

Schachner was the first chair of Heidelberg’s Department of Neurobiology from 1976 to 1988 and led the development of a center for neuroscience at Heidelberg. From 1988 she established a center for the study of neurobiology at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

She was director of the ZMNH Institute for Neural Structures from 1995 to 2011 and is now head of the emeritus group Biosynthesis of Neural Structures, advisor for the Neuroscience Center at the Li Ka-Shing University Shantou, China and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, USA,

A member of the prestigious German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Schachner has focused her research on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie development, maintenance, and modifications of the adult central nervous system. She has authored more than 800 articles in peer reviewed journals, her h-index was 118 in November 2015.

Press release of Universität Heidelberg (in German)

Press release of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (in German, pdf)