Laura Busse

In their 2019 publication in Neuron, Busse and her colleagues at Tübingen shed light on the mechanisms by which the large degree of visual information coming in from the retina is processed and transferred in a manageable way to the visual cortex. In the feedforward visual processing pathway, the retina extracts visual information from light inputs and passes this information on via its output layer of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which project axons to the dorsolateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) of the thalamus, which in turn routes this information to the primary visual cortex (V1). Whereas the dLGN has traditionally been thought of as a passive relay in visual signal processing, Busse and her colleagues investigate the hypothesis that it might instead be involved in actively shaping visual signals via several factors including recombination of incoming RGC inputs, processing of cortico-thalamic feedback inputs and local inhibitory interneuron computations, amongst others, which will actively shape the output signals sent to the primary visual cortex (V1) (e.g. via altering the thalamic firing modes between burst vs. tonic firing). To test the contribution of recombination of retinal input signals from RGCs, Busse and her colleagues recorded responses from RGCs and thalamic cells to the same set of visual stimuli and then used computational modelling to see which retinal cells contribute to the responses of thalamic cells. Fascinatingly, they found that the output of one thalamic cell relies on no more than 5 retinal cells, and that though these retinal inputs are combined to generate an output, they are not given equal weights. Their work highlighted the active role of the thalamus in signal processing, not just signal relaying as is thought to be the canonical function of the thalamus.

In 2016, Busse was recruited to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany to hold a professorship within the Munich Center for Neurosciences. Busse currently leads the Vision Circuits Lab along with co-principal investigator Steffen Katzner within the Department of Biology, Neurobiology Division.

In 2010, Busse became a Junior Research Group Leader in the Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Tübingen, in Germany. She led a team of researchers to approach studying the visual stimuli in an ethologically relevant way. Since visual systems are designed to reflect an organisms environment, Busse shaped her research program around probing the neural circuits underlying visual processing with stimuli similar to those that would be experienced in that organisms natural environment.

For her graduate work, Busse explored how cognition influences sensory information processing. For example, Busse became interested in top-down processing of sensory information in the case of visual attention, which is the ability of the brain to focus on one aspect of the visual environment even though it is taking in multitudes of visual information at once. Busse first showed both spatial and feature-based influences of exogenous cueing on motion processing. Autonomic shifts in attention, driven by exogenous cueing, appeared to be integrally driven by characteristic modulations of sensory processing. Busse then explored how cognitive attention in macaques changes the neural representation of motion information. Busse found that visual attention enhances the spatio-temporal structure of receptive fields for moving objects. Busse completed her dissertation in 2008, showing that cognitive factors have strong modulatory effects on the processing of visual motion.

In late 2002, Busse pursued her doctoral work back in Germany at the German Primate Center Göttingen and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. Busse worked under the mentorship of Stefan Treue, where she entered the field of visual processing, exploring the neural basis of visual perception using non-human primates as a model organism. Busse completed her PhD in Neuroscience in 2006 and then moved back to the United States for one year funded by the Leopoldina Postdoctoral Scholarship.  Busse completed her postdoctoral work at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, USA in 2007 and then moved to the Institute of Ophthalmology at the University College London, in the United Kingdom to work as a Research Associate under the mentorship of Matteo Carandini from 2008 to 2010. Under Carandini, Busse explored visual processing in the cat V1 and visual behavior in mice.

During her time at Tübingen, Busse pursued research abroad for her Master's in Neuroscience. She moved to the United States for 6 months where she studied under the mentorship of Marty Woldorff at Duke University. Busse explored the cognitive underpinnings of attention in the human brain in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. After successfully completing her Master's in 2001, Busse stayed at Duke University for another year to work as a research technician, continuing to explore the neurobiological underpinnings of cognition using various imaging techniques such as fMRI, EEG, and ERP.

Laura Busse (born c. 1977) is a German neuroscientist and professor of Systemic Neuroscience within the Division of Neurobiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Busse's lab studies context-dependent visual processing in mouse models by performing large scale in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the thalamic and cortical circuits of awake and behaving mice.

Busse was born in Germany in 1977. She had an early interest in brain studies and received a scholarship from the State of Bavaria that supported her studies in basic psychology at the University of Leipzig, in Leipzig, Germany from 1997 to 1999. Busse then pursued further studies at the Max Planck Research School at the University of Tübingen in Germany where she focused in Neural and Behavioral Sciences from 1999 to 2001.