The German Research Foundation, known as the DFG, is supporting the venture with approximately 1.8 million euros over six years. The Emmy Noether Program is one of the most prestigious funding instruments available to early-career researchers in Germany, designed to allow outstanding scientists to build their own independent research groups and qualify for a university teaching career. For Farnworth, the award provides not only financial security but also the freedom to assemble a dedicated team and pursue a long-term scientific vision without the constraints that often accompany more narrowly defined project grants.

Farnworth arrived in Mainz on August 1, 2026, and his group is based at the Institute of Developmental Biology and Neurobiology, where he works in close proximity to the Neural Circuits Lab. The group is additionally affiliated with the Focus Program Translational Neurosciences and the Institute of Pathophysiology, giving it access to a broad network of neuroscientific expertise. The team he is assembling will consist of one postdoctoral researcher, two doctoral researchers, and a part-time technical assistant, a configuration typical of an Emmy Noether group and large enough to combine genetic experimentation, single-cell molecular analysis, and advanced imaging within a single laboratory.

The central question driving the new group is deceptively simple: why are some neural circuits far more evolutionarily flexible than others? Within a single brain, neighboring structures can follow dramatically different evolutionary trajectories. One region may be extensively remodeled across lineages, with new cell types appearing, cell numbers expanding or contracting, and connectivity patterns shifting, while another region remains essentially unchanged over vast stretches of evolutionary time. Understanding what makes a neural circuit conservative or permissive to change would illuminate a fundamental principle of how brains evolve, with implications reaching far beyond insects.

To tackle this question, Farnworth focuses on two well-characterized regions of the insect brain. The first is the mushroom bodies, paired structures best known for their roles in learning and memory, particularly in the context of olfactory association. The second is the central complex, a midline-spanning network of neuropils that serves as the insect’s navigation and orientation hub, integrating sensory information to control walking, turning, and spatial orientation. Over the course of insect evolution, these two regions have diverged sharply in their histories. Mushroom bodies have been extensively remodeled in different groups of insects, reflecting adaptations to widely varying lifestyles, whereas the central complex has remained comparatively conserved, preserving a recognizable ground plan across lineages.

Farnworth’s hypothesis is that the answer to this contrast may lie in development. During the development of an insect, many thousands of nerve cells and millions of connections arise from a comparatively small number of neural stem cells. Specific developmental programs determine which cell types are formed, how many cells of each type are produced, and which connections they establish with one another. We want to understand how these programs change over the course of evolution and how these changes allow neural circuits to adapt to different lifestyles and environmental conditions, Farnworth explains. If the developmental programs governing the mushroom bodies are inherently more modular or more tolerant of variation than those governing the central complex, that could explain why one structure has been free to diversify while the other has been locked in place.

Testing this idea requires a comparative framework, and the group has selected four insect species that together span a wide swath of the insect evolutionary tree: the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum, the clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi, and the Indianmeal moth Plodia interpunctella. Each species represents a distinct lineage, and each brings a different lifestyle to the comparison. The fruit fly is the canonical genetic model with a compact brain; the beetle represents holometabolous insects with a different larval development; the clonal raider ant offers a social species in which brain regions involved in learning and communication have adapted to colony life; and the moth adds a lineage with sophisticated olfactory-driven behaviors. By comparing homologous brain structures across these species, the researchers can distinguish features that have been conserved from those that have changed.

Methodologically, the project combines single-cell analyses, genetic tools, and high-resolution imaging. Single-cell approaches allow the team to catalog which cell types are present in each brain region of each species, effectively producing molecular census lists that can be compared across lineages. Genetic methods make it possible to trace the lineages of neural stem cells and to manipulate developmental programs experimentally, revealing how changes in stem cell behavior translate into changes in adult circuitry. High-resolution imaging, meanwhile, documents the anatomy of the resulting circuits, from the positions of cell bodies to the fine structure of the connections they form. Together, these techniques allow the researchers to determine which components of neural circuits have been conserved over evolutionary time and where changes have occurred in cell types, cell numbers, or connectivity.

The work exemplifies an approach often described as neuro-evo-devo, the intersection of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and developmental biology. Rather than studying a single model organism in isolation, this framework treats development as the mechanism through which evolutionary change is enacted. Mutations do not reshape adult brains directly; they alter developmental programs, and it is these altered programs that produce different cell types, different cell numbers, and different wiring patterns in the next generation. By reading the developmental programs of multiple species and comparing their outputs, researchers can reconstruct how evolutionary transformations in the brain actually happened, and potentially predict which kinds of changes are easy for evolution to make and which are difficult.

For Farnworth, the move to Mainz represents the culmination of a research trajectory that has taken him through several of Europe’s leading institutions. He has been studying the evolution and development of the insect brain since his doctoral research. At the University of Göttingen, he investigated the development of the central complex in fruit flies and red flour beetles, gaining firsthand experience with the comparative approach that now anchors his independent program. Most recently, at the University of Bristol, he studied the evolution of neural circuits in butterflies, extending his comparisons to a lineage in which visual and cognitive adaptations are especially pronounced. JGU provides an excellent research environment for my neuro-evo-devo approach, which seeks to understand brain evolution through its development, Farnworth says. This combination of strong developmental and evolutionary biology is rare. JGU also offers excellent core facilities, particularly in imaging. With the Emmy Noether funding now secured and the group taking shape in Mainz, the coming six years promise to shed new light on one of neuroscience’s deepest questions: how the tiny brains of insects are built, and why evolution has rewritten some parts of their blueprint while leaving others untouched for hundreds of millions of years.

Subject of Research: Evolution and development of neural circuits in the insect brain

Article Title: Evolutionary neurobiologist Max Farnworth joins JGU from Bristol with Emmy Noether Funding

Article References: Evolutionary neurobiologist Max Farnworth joins JGU from Bristol with Emmy Noether Funding. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: neuroscience, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, insect brain, Emmy Noether Program, DFG, mushroom bodies, central complex, neural circuits, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, single-cell analysis, neuro-evo-devo

Research Units are one of the DFG’s principal instruments for supporting coordinated, multi-site collaboration. They allow teams at different institutions to pursue pressing questions in their fields and to take innovative directions that would be difficult to achieve within the boundaries of individual projects. Funding can run for up to eight years, distributed across successive periods that each depend on favourable external evaluation. With the latest decisions, the DFG is currently supporting 191 Research Units, seven Clinical Research Units and 15 Centres for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Clinical Research Units are distinguished by the close coupling of laboratory research with clinical practice, while the Centres for Advanced Studies are tailored specifically to the working methods of the humanities and social sciences, where sustained reflection and theory development often matter as much as data collection.

The new units span a striking range of disciplines, from environmental history and communication studies to neuroscience, climate law, nutritional physiology, materials science, psychology, dermatology and early modern philology. Their breadth illustrates the DFG’s competitive, bottom-up funding model, in which researchers themselves define the questions and assemble consortia that are then assessed in a rigorous peer review process. What follows is a survey of the nine new networks, each of which will bring together specialists from multiple institutions under a designated spokesperson.

Wetlands, long treated in European history as sinister and unproductive spaces to be drained and cultivated, are the subject of a unit based at the University of Augsburg. Today these transition zones are recognised as vital carbon sinks, coastal shields and natural water filters, yet the cultural history of how people related to them remains poorly understood. Working within the environmental humanities, the unit Thinking with wetlands. Histories from the quaking zone 1630-1997, led by Professor Simone Müller, will examine the ambivalent experiences, contested visions and shifting terminology that shaped the human-wetland relationship in Central and Western Europe. Its aim is to reconstruct how communities lived and thought with swamps, drew philosophical inspiration from them and, remarkably early in industrial history, began campaigning for their protection. The project promises to connect environmental science debates about peatland restoration with a much longer intellectual and social history.

At the Freie Universität Berlin, Professor Margreth Lünenborg will lead a unit on Media Practices of Contradicting in Networked Publics. The network approaches contradiction as a relational and dynamic form of communication through which people who have been disadvantaged socially, economically or culturally raise their voices against dominance they perceive as hegemonic. Beyond the discursive practices by which media convey dissenting content, the researchers will analyse the digital conditions, including social media platforms, that have fundamentally reshaped such practices. They will also study material and creative forms of contradiction in which the media themselves, as organisations, infrastructures and technologies, become the object of dissent. The work is expected to sharpen theoretical and empirical tools for understanding protest communication in contemporary networked publics.

Neuroscience is represented by a unit at the University of Bonn led by Professor Christian Henneberger, entitled Inside and outside the synapse: Challenging dogmas of synaptic signalling and neuromodulation. Information in the nervous system travels not only through highly targeted communication at synapses but also via messenger substances whose effects extend beyond the boundaries of individual synaptic contacts. Recent research increasingly reveals the diversity and dynamic character of the interplay between these signalling pathways. The unit will investigate how nervous tissue filters and translates incoming information and converts it into electrical and chemical activity, with the explicit aim of reviewing established ideas about synaptic transmission and broadening understanding of information processing in the brain. Better models of neuromodulation could ultimately inform how neuroscientists interpret everything from learning to the action of psychoactive drugs.

Legal scholarship enters the portfolio through a University of Bremen unit led by Professor Claudio Franzius on Transformative climate law: space – time – society. Germany’s Federal Climate Change Act commits the country to complete climate neutrality by 2045, a goal that demands a clear, legally binding roadmap for fundamental changes to the economy and society. The unit’s central premise is that the question of how legislation can drive such a transformation is itself transforming the legal system. Researchers will examine the economic, environmental and social dimensions of the transition to climate neutrality, seeking to identify the new framework required for effective, future-oriented and therefore sustainable climate law. The findings could influence how legislatures across Europe structure decarbonisation mandates.

A jointly funded D-A-CH unit at Dresden University of Technology, led by Professor Klaus Reinhardt in cooperation with the Swiss National Science Foundation, will study heat-treated dietary lipids, abbreviated HTDL. Humans are the only known species to process food with heat, and while cooking makes food easier to digest it also triggers metabolic and physiological changes, for example through altered lipid compounds in dietary fats. Little is known so far about the bioactivity of these compounds. The unit will test whether heat treatment changes lipidomes, the complete lipid inventories of organisms, along with membrane and biophysical properties of cells, neurometabolic processes, metabolic signalling pathways and reproductive processes. It will even ask whether such changes can alter the evolution of organisms that consume heat-treated fats, connecting food chemistry with physiology and evolutionary biology in an unusually ambitious synthesis.

Materials science gains a unit at the University of Kassel under Professor Thomas Niendorf focused on iron-based shape-memory alloys. These materials could open new component-design applications compared with established nickel-titanium alloys, yet their various shape-memory effects have largely been considered and exploited separately, and no suitable alloy design exists for combining them systematically in products. The unit Combined effects in Fe-based shape memory alloys – Model-driven alloy design taking into account process-microstructure-property relationships aims to investigate these combined effects in depth, develop high-performance alloys through model-driven design and build a fundamental understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Because iron-based alloys are cheaper and more workable than nickel-titanium, success could broaden shape-memory technology from niche actuators toward large-scale engineering applications.

Psychology and communication studies converge in a University of Mainz unit led by Professor Roland Imhoff, Beyond Crazy: Integrating Benefits into the Analysis of Conspiracy Beliefs. Previous research has concentrated almost exclusively on the harmful consequences of conspiracy thinking, but this network asks what potential functions and benefits such beliefs may offer their adherents. By investigating these functions systematically from psychological and societal perspectives, the unit hopes to explain the popularity and enduring appeal of conspiracy theories more convincingly and to advance the methodological development of the field. The reframing is intended to produce a more nuanced theoretical understanding rather than to trivialise the real dangers of conspiratorial narratives.

Medicine and history complete the list. At the University of Tübingen, Professor Claudia Günther will lead a unit on the immunopathology of cutaneous lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune skin disease that appears in several forms and can cause severe scarring and hair loss, profoundly affecting patients’ quality of life. No therapies beyond glucocorticosteroids, commonly known as cortisone, have been approved for the condition, and its molecular mechanisms and observable subtypes remain inadequately defined. The unit aims to close these gaps and lay foundations for future treatments. Finally, at the University of Würzburg, Professor Regina Toepfer will direct a unit on ‘Alternative Facts’ in the Sixteenth Century, tracing a phenomenon named during Donald Trump’s first presidency back to the early modern period, an era that shaped Europe’s understanding of itself and its media landscape. The unit defines alternative facts as a linguistic practice that challenges accepted standards of knowledge and deliberately undermines them through competing claims in rhetoric, religion or politics, in order to obstruct dialogue, disrupt discourse, create uncertainty or stage particular narratives. Together, the nine networks demonstrate how competitive funding can connect the deepest historical questions with the most immediate challenges of climate, health and democratic communication.

Subject of Research: DFG funding of nine new interdisciplinary Research Units and extensions of existing networks

Article Title: DFG to fund nine new research units

Article References: DFG to fund nine new research units. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: DFG, Research Units, research funding, Germany, climate law, neuroscience, shape-memory alloys, conspiracy beliefs, cutaneous lupus, wetlands, heat-treated dietary lipids, alternative facts