The rockefeller university

B.S.E., The Cooper Union

Dissecting Synaptic Vesicle Endocytosis

presented by Timothy A. Ryan

Moritz Armbruster was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and moved to the desert in Tempe, Arizona, when he was seven years old. Coming from a mathematically inclined family, he moved to New York and studied electrical engineering at the Cooper Union before enrolling for a Ph.D. here.

Moritz tackled the problem of how synapses work. Synapses package their payload of chemical messages, the neurotransmitters, into small synaptic vesicles. One of the great challenges a synapse faces is that it has only about 100 of these vesicles, and once used to deliver the chemical message they must be rebuilt. Moritz pushed the state of the art in our abilities to follow this rebuilding process in real time, which helped him determine one of the key control points of how the rebuilding is regulated.

Moritz is a remarkable individual with a huge number of talents. There is literally nothing he could not master in the lab. One of his lab mates once said that he has “ice in his veins,” as nothing seemed to perturb him when he did experiments. It was key to his success as things always go wrong in complex experiments, but Moritz always took the attitude that the problem must be solvable, and then proceeded to solve it. He is a true master experimentalist.