In advance of her Marianne Fillenz Award Lecture on 27 November 2025 we were delighted to talk to Professor Kristine Krug (Otto-von-Guericke University and Visiting Professor at DPAG) about her career and research. Kristine was Marianne Fillenz’s last Bachelor in Physiological Sciences student at St. Anne’s College. Marianne’s Neuroscience and Physiology tutorials and her rigorous focus on experimental evidence significantly shaped Kristine’s scientific journey.
After the Bachelor, Kristine undertook her DPhil in the University Laboratory of Physiology at Oxford, researching visual map formation in the visual cortex of hamsters and ferrets with Ian D. Thompson as a Wellcome Prize Scholar. Her thesis received the BNA thesis prize and the Rolleston Memorial Prize from Oxford. After postdoctoral research positions at the Max-Planck-Institute for biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany and Oxford, where she worked on the neural mechanisms of 3D visual processing in the macaque brain, she held Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin and University Research Fellowships at DPAG. In 2014, she was promoted to Associate Professor in Neuroscience.
Kristine moved in 2019 to the Otto-von-Guericke-University and the Leibniz-Institute in Neurobiology in Magdeburg, Germany as Heisenberg- Professor (DFG) and Chair in Sensory Physiology. The main focus of her research is to elucidate the neuronal signals and interactions that shape our vivid perceptual experience of the dynamic, three-dimensional world around us.
In what ways have you seen the real-world impact of your scientific research?
Fundamental research generates knowledge. Knowledge changes how we see the world. In the current intellectual climate, we sometimes forget how central scientific curiosity and understanding is to how we organise ourselves as a society. Through basic research I strive to contribute to our understanding of how the brain generates our experience of the world. But if you ask about classical translation, some of our comparative ground-truth studies of primate imaging have impacted research and clinical interpretation of MR images of individual brains.
In what direction do you see your research developing over the next few years?
We are at a point where we have now the tools that we can start to understand, constructively alter and potentially generate de novo the dynamic brain signals that generate complex perceptual experience in the primate brain. This is my goal.
What first inspired you to become a scientist?
There was a book about the brain, which my chemistry teacher, Herr Schnell, gave me as a prize in a logic competition, when I was about 17. In my first year at Oxford, the tutorials I had with Marianne Fillenz on Neuroscience fundamentally shaped how I look for and at experimental evidence.
How did you come to choose and specialise in your area of research?
As a Physiological Science undergraduate at Oxford I briefly flirted with genetics. But trying to clone a gene as part of a short project in the Dunn School made me realise that pipetting would bore me to death. I also managed to plug in the gel the wrong way round and lost my DNA probe. In contrast, I basically entered Ian Thompson's lab for my Bachelor dissertation on visual map formation in my second year and only emerged at the end of my third year when I had to for my exams. So, I was hooked on neuroscience and vision. Going forward, what I really wanted to understand were the actual brain computations that underlie our higher cognitive brain functions. The only way to do this in real time and at the level where they actually take place is looking at the level of cellular interactions in the behaving primate.
Is there any advice you would give to an early career research scientist (or to a younger you!)
Ask more questions and dare to do more and more high-risk experiments. Even when a high-risk experiment appears to fail, usually something interesting emerges from the data that are generated.