(Vienna, 02 February 2026) On 2 February 2026, Sanja Bauer Mikulovic took up a §99 (5) assistant professorship for "Neuronal Circuits for Social Behaviour and Learning" as part of the tenure track model at the Medical University of Vienna. She is moving from the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg to the Center for Brain Research at MedUni Vienna.
Sanja Bauer Mikulovic holds a prestigious ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council. The funded project investigates how empathy arises in the brain and why it is absent or impaired in some individuals – based on the underlying hypothesis that a lack of empathy could be a neurobiologically accessible problem. To this end, she is using findings on "liberation cells" in the hippocampus and systematically researching over a period of five years which neural circuits and neurotransmitters (e.g. dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, oxytocin) control empathy, how cognitive and emotional brain regions work together, how empathy is altered in mouse models for autism and psychopathy, and whether targeted interventions can strengthen empathy.
About
Sanja Bauer Mikulovic is a neuroscientist with an international and interdisciplinary academic background. She was born and raised in Serbia, studied biomedical engineering in Vienna, and then earned her doctorate in neuroscience at Uppsala University in Sweden. It was there that she began to explore the role of the hippocampus in memory processes and emotions. This was followed by postdoctoral positions at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn.
Since 2021, she has headed the Cognition & Emotion research group at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology (LIN) in Magdeburg. In her work, she investigates the interactions between cognitive and emotional processes. She combines modern imaging techniques with electrophysiological methods and behavioural analyses. Her research has attracted international attention.
Sanja Bauer Mikulovic has received several awards for her scientific achievements, including the Leibniz Best Minds Award. In 2023, she was also accepted into the Young Academy of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In addition to her research, she is actively involved in promoting young scientists.