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Philipp Berens

Address:	Spemannstr. 41 72076 Tübingen
Room number:	1.B.02
Phone:	+49 7071 601 1775
E-Mail:	philipp.berens

Philipp Berens

Position: PhD Student Unit: Alumni Bethge

Overview
Curriculum Vitae
Publications

I am interested in the computations performed by neuronal ensembles in the early visual system of primates . As a graduate student I am working with Matthias Bethge and Andreas Tolias developing statistical models and employing multi-cell recordings in awake primates.

CircStat, a Matlab toolbox for circular statistics including functions for descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing and correlation analysis (Link). The toolbox is described in detail my article, which can be found at JSS. The toolbox was selected as File Exchange Pick of the Week.

I am teaching the Introduction to Statistics class in the Masters program Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience together with Alex Ecker.

Education:

2008-now: Graduate Student at the IMPRS of Neural and Behavioural Sciences, University of Tübingen
2003-2009: Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Tübingen
2002-2008: Diploma in Bioinformatics at the University of Tübingen

Employment:

2008-now: PhD student at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics and Baylor College of Medicine
2006: Internship at the Süddeutsche Zeitung
2005-2008: Research assistant and Diploma student at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics

Scholarships:

2009-now: PhD scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung)
2004-2007: Scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung)

Articles (9):
•	Ecker AS , Berens P , Tolias AS and Bethge M (October-2011) The effect of noise correlations in populations of diversely tuned neurons Journal of Neuroscience 31(40) 14272-14283.
•	Macke J , Berens P and Bethge M (July-2011) Statistical analysis of multi-cell recordings: linking population coding models to experimental data Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience 5(35) 1-2.
•	Berens P , Ecker AS , Gerwinn S , Tolias AS and Bethge M (March-2011) Reassessing optimal neural population codes with neurometric functions Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108(11) 4423-4428.
•	Berens P , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (November-2010) Local field potentials, BOLD and spiking activity: Relationships and physiological mechanisms Nature Precedings 2010 1-27.
•	Ecker AS , Berens P , Keliris GA , Bethge M , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (January-2010) Decorrelated Neuronal Firing in Cortical Microcircuits Science 327(5965) 584-587.
•	Berens P (September-2009) CircStat: A Matlab Toolbox for Circular Statistics Journal of Statistical Software 31(10) 1-21.
•	Macke JH , Berens P , Ecker AS , Tolias AS and Bethge M (February-2009) Generating Spike Trains with Specified Correlation Coefficients Neural Computation 21(2) 397-423.
•	Berens P , Keliris GA , Ecker AS , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (December-2008) Feature selectivity of the gamma-band of the local field potential in primate primary visual cortex Frontiers in Neuroscience 2(2) 199-207.
•	Berens P , Keliris GA , Ecker AS , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (June-2008) Comparing the feature selectivity of the gamma-band of the local field potential and the underlying spiking activity in primate visual cortex Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 2(2) 1-11.
Conference papers (3):
•	Gerwinn S , Berens P and Bethge M (April-2010) A joint maximum-entropy model for binary neural population patterns and continuous signals In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22, 23rd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2009), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 620-628.
•	Berens P , Gerwinn S , Ecker AS and Bethge M (April-2010) Neurometric function analysis of population codes In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22, 23rd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2009), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 90-98.
•	Bethge M and Berens P (September-2008) Near-Maximum Entropy Models for Binary Neural Representations of Natural Images In: Advances in neural information processing systems 20, Twenty-First Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2007), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 97-104.
Contributions to books (1):
•	Berens P , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS : Local Field Potentials, BOLD, and Spiking Activity: Relationsships and Physiological Mechanisms, 599-624. In: Visual population codes: toward a common multivariate framework for cell recording and functional imaging, (Ed) N. Kriegeskorte, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, (January-2012).
Technical reports (1):
•	Berens P and Velasco MJ : The circular statistics toolbox for Matlab, 184, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, (April-2009).
Posters (16):
•	Ecker A , Berens P , Tolias A and Bethge M (February-2012): The correlation structure induced by fluctuations in attention, 9th Annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience Meeting (Cosyne 2012), Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
•	Berens P , Ecker AS , Gerwinn S , Tolias AS and Bethge M (February-2011): Optimal Population Coding, Revisited, Computational and Systems Neuroscience Meeting (COSYNE 2011), Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
•	Ecker AS , Berens P , Keliris GA , Bethge M , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (November-2010): Decorrelated neuronal firing in cortical microcircuits, 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience 2010), San Diego, CA, USA.
•	Ecker AS , Berens P , Keliris GA , Bethge M , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (June-2010): Decorrelated Firing in Cortical Microcircuits, AREADNE 2010: Research in Encoding And Decoding of Neural Ensembles, Santorini, Greece.
•	Berens P , Macke JH , Ecker AS , Cotton RJ , Bethge M and Tolias AS (March-2009): Sensory input statistics and network mechanisms in primate primary visual cortex, Computational and Systems Neuroscience Meeting (COSYNE 2009), Salt Lake City, UT, USA, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2009(Conference Abstracts: Computational and Systems Neuroscience).
•	Ecker AS , Berens P , Hoenselaar A , Subramaniyan M , Tolias AS and Bethge M (September-2008): Towards the neural basis of the flash-lag effect, International Workshop on Aspects of Adaptive Cortex Dynamics, 2008 1.
•	Macke JH , Berens P , Ecker AS , Opper M , Tolias AS and Bethge M (July-2008): Modeling populations of spiking neurons with the Dichotomized Gaussian distribution, Annual Meeting 2008 of Sloan-Swartz Centers for Theoretical Neurobiology, Princeton, NJ, USA.
•	Bethge M , Macke JH , Berens P , Ecker AS and Tolias AS (June-2008): Flexible Models for Population Spike Trains, AREADNE 2008: Research in Encoding and Decoding of Neural Ensembles, Santorini, Greece.
•	Berens P , Ecker AS , Subramaniyan M , Macke JH , Hauck P , Bethge M and Tolias AS (June-2008): Pairwise Correlations and Multineuronal Firing Patterns in the Primary Visual Cortex of the Awake, Behaving Macaque, AREADNE 2008: Research in Encoding and Decoding of Neural Ensembles, Santorini, Greece.
•	Berens P , Ecker AS , Keliris GA , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (November-2007): On the spatial scale of the local field potential - orientation and ocularity tuning of the local field potential in the primary visual cortex of the macaque, 37th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience 2007), San Diego, CA, USA.
•	Ecker AS , Siapas AG , Hoenselaar A , Berens P , Keliris GA , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (November-2007): Recording chronically from the same neurons in awake, behaving primates, 37th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience 2007), San Diego, CA, USA.
•	Berens P and Bethge M (September-2007): Near-Maximum Entropy Models for Binary Neural Representations of Natural Images, Neural Coding, Computation and Dynamics (NCCD 07), 1 19.
•	Ecker AS , Berens P , Bethge M , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (September-2007): Studying the effects of noise correlations on population coding using a sampling method, Neural Coding, Computation and Dynamics (NCCD 07), Hossegor, France.
•	Ecker AS , Berens P , Keliris GA , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (April-2007): A Data Management System for Electrophysiological Data Analysis, 31st Göttingen Neurobiology Conference, Göttingen, Germany, Neuroforum, 13(Supplement) 1222.
•	Berens P , Keliris GA , Ecker AS , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (April-2007): Orientation tuning of the local field potential and multi-unit activity in the primary visual cortex of the macaque, 31st Göttingen Neurobiology Conference, Göttingen, Germany, Neuroforum, 13(Supplement) 735.
•	Berens P , Ecker AS , Hoenselaar A , Keliris GA , Siapas AG , Logothetis NK and Tolias AS (June-2006): Spikes are phase locked to the gamma-band of the local field potential oscillations in the primary visual cortex of the macaque, AREADNE 2006: Research in Encoding and Decoding of Neural Ensembles, Santorini, Greece.
Theses (1):
•	Berens P : Pairwise Correlations and Multineuronal Firing Patterns in Primary Visual Cortex, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, (April-1-2008). Diplom thesis