Steffen Wolff is assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology and member of the University of Maryland – Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery. He received his Ph.D. from the Friedrich Miescher Institute and the University of Basel in Switzerland, where he worked with Andreas Lüthi on dissecting the role of interneuron populations in the amygdala during fear learning. As a postdoctoral fellow with Bence Ölveczky at Harvard University, he studied the role of the striatum and its inputs from motor cortex and thalamus in motor skill learning and execution.

The Wolff lab opened in 2021 and studies the neuronal circuitry underlying motor skill learning as well as the interactions between learning processes – of the same and of different kinds – on the behavioral and neuronal level. Based on his postdoctoral experience, Wolff has built sophisticated custom infrastructure, allowing for high-throughput behavioral training and for continuous long-term electrophysiological recordings. The lab combines this with a range of circuit dissection approaches and intricate behavioral paradigms. Together, this allows the lab to directly probe the mechanisms that underlie learning and memory in general and learning interactions in particular.