Martin Giurfa

Giurfa is a recipient of the Silver Medal of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and of an Advanced Fellowship from the European Research Council (ERC). He is also an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). In 2013, He was distinguished with the Raices Award of the Argentinean Government. He is an Honors Professor of the University of Buenos Aires and the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University.

Galizia G, Eisenhardt D & Giurfa M. (eds.) 2012. Honeybee Neurobiology and Behavior. Springer, 509pp.

In 2001, he moved to Toulouse, France, as a Professor of Neurosciences of Paul Sabatier University. In 2003, he created the Research Center on Animal Cognition, a multidisciplinary research institute depending both on Paul Sabatier University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, which focuses on the mechanisms of cognitive processing in various animal species and which he directed until 2017. From 2008 to 2012, he was President of the National Committee of Neurosciences of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and served in numerous French and European boards of neurosciences. In 2016, he adopted the French nationality. He has produced significant contributions dissecting the neural mechanisms of learning and memory in bees and other insects.

His work on symmetry categorization by honeybees in 1996 followed by his demonstration of concept learning in bees represented a turning point for the field of insect behavior, as they promoted a novel cognitive perspective to analyze honey bee behavior and decision making. This framework represented conceptual switch for a research domain, which had mostly attributed limited cognitive capacities to insects until then. In 1997, he obtained his Habilitation Degree of the Free University of Berlin and became group leader and assistant professor at the institute of Neurobiology of that University.

After obtaining his PhD Degree from the University of Buenos Aires under the supervision of Josué Núñez, he moved to Germany in 1990, to work at the institute of Neurobiology of the Free University of Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Menzel. He was first Fellow of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and then Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His first works focused on color and shape vision in honeybees leading to the discovery of color preferences. and color detection mechanisms by bees.

Martin Giurfa was born in Lima, Peru, from an Argentinean mother who raised him alone and registered him as an Argentinean citizen. He grew up in Lima where he attended the French School Lycée franco-péruvien and moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina at the end of 1980 to study Biology at the University of Buenos Aires. Argentina was still under control of the military dictatorship (National Reorganization Process) and Martin Giurfa enrolled in the student movement resisting dictatorial oppression. Under the banner of the Partido Intransigente, a left-wing party, he played an influential role in that movement and in 1984, after the return of the democracy to Argentina, he became president of the Student Union of his faculty, the Faculty of Natural and Exact Sciences.

Martin Giurfa is an Argentinean-French neurobiologist and neuroethologist (born September 1962), member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, and the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He is acknowledged for his work on the neural mechanisms of cognition in invertebrates, which he mostly explores using honeybees as models for understanding basic principles of learning and memory.