Silvia Arber

Silvia Arber (born 1968 in Geneva) is a Swiss neurobiologist. She teaches and researches at both the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland.

Education Silvia Arber studied biology at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and completed her doctorate in 1995 at the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel.

Career and research Arber subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Columbia University in New York City. In 2000, she returned to Basel as a Professor of Neurobiology and Cell Biology continuing her research work and teaching at the Biozentrum as well as at the FMI.

Arber's research investigates the mechanisms involved in the function and assembly of neuronal circuits controlling motor behavior. She has shown that premotor interneuron groups differ from each other in their functionality and distribution in the spinal cord and that this property depends on the timing of their generation during development. Silvia Arber then turned her attention to deciphering the anatomical and functional organization of the brain stem (since 2014). This provided insight into the neuronal networks that transmit instructions for various body movements from the brain to the spinal cord. This work showed that very specific neurons are connected into circuit modules that control different aspects of body movements. For example, the fine motor skills of the arm and hand are regulated by different brainstem networks than walking or posture.

She serves as a member of the Editorial Board for Cell.

Awards and honors 1998: Pfizer Forschungspreis 2003: National Latsis Prize 2005: elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) 2005: Schellenberg Prize 2008: Friedrich Miescher Award 2009: European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigators Grant 2014: Otto Naegeli Prize 2014: elected Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE) 2017: Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine 2020: Elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 2022: The Brain Prize Personal life Arber is the daughter of the Swiss microbiologist and geneticist Werner Arber, who in 1978 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.