Growing Up in Science – Berlin with Prof. Dr. Martin Rolfs

The Official Story

Martin Rolfs chairs the Active Perception and Cognition group at the Department of Psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research has advanced the idea that we can only understand perception and cognition if we study their fundamental mechanisms in active observers. The lab’s work has shown that our actions fundamentally shape what we perceive, process, and remember. To study active perception and cognition, the group has built up a core repertoire of methodological techniques (eye tracking, motion capture, psychophysics, computational modeling, and EEG) and engages in international collaborations to incorporate additional expertise (e.g., clinical studies, neurophysiology in primates, robotics). Their aim is to understand the interactions of movement control, vision and visual cognition (learning, memory, causality) at functional, systemic, and algorithmic levels.

Martin studied Psychology at Potsdam University (Diploma in 2003) and obtained his PhD in 2007 with summa cum laude. For his dissertation (supervised by Prof. Dr. Reinhold Kliegl) he received the Heinz-Heckhausen prize of the German Psychological Society in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, he was a postdoc in Patrick Cavanagh’s lab at the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception at Université Paris Descartes. In 2009, he was awarded a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the European Commission, which he used to work with Marisa Carrasco at New York University and with Eric Castet at Aix-Marseille University, from 2010 to 2012. In 2012, he established an Emmy Noether group at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin. In 2018, he started a DFG-funded Heisenberg professorship at the Department of Psychology. In 2019, he was awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for the project “VIS-À-VIS: How visual action shapes active vision”.

Martin is a PI at the Exzellenzcluster Science of Intelligence, the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and the Einstein Center for Neurosciences Berlin.

His Unofficial Story

For the first twelve years of his life, Martin grew up in East Germany. The country no longer exists but it has left traces for everyone who spent a formative part of their lives there. He and his sister were raised by a single mom, in a satellite district of Potsdam that was developed in the 1970s. The adults around him were well-educated but non-intellectual people. The fall of the wall meant that everything that had always been for certain was now gone. Unemployment was high and violence not uncommon. While this situation left a lot of the young generation with no obvious perspective, it brought about many opportunities as well.

Martin was able to join one of the top high-schools in East Germany that specialized in Math & Natural Sciences. He had always been good at Math, but dropped to mediocrity as soon as he joined that school. So he started a band. Without a doubt, being mediocre at making music was much more fun than being mediocre at math. In the end, his high-school grades were good enough to study Psychology at the University of Potsdam.

During his first couple of undergraduate years, Martin realized that everyone around him had a much clearer idea about what psychology is, why they studied it, and what they wanted to do with it in the future. Academia was not something he had on his radar until way into his undergraduate studies, where the preparation for an oral exam sparked his interest in perception and cognition. The exam was tough, but he left with an offer for a student RA position in the lab that he would later do his PhD in. Just when doing a PhD became a topic, his supervisor, Reinhold Kliegl, received a Leibniz prize and started to work on new topics in collaboration with physicists such as Ralf Engbert. His advisors allowed Martin to pursue his own ideas, and he started studying the mechanisms generating microscopic eye movements. This was a field that had died 30 years ago, but should soon become very active again. While this reemergence of interest was a coincidence, it helped getting papers out and putting his name on people’s postdoc radar.

Throughout his PhD, his band remained very active and a potential future path. They won a band competition, released a couple of demos and an album and played many concerts throughout Germany (though mostly to empty places). But it became clear that it was impossible to do both music and science with the level of dedication that it required. The band fell apart, and Martin planned to move to the US for a postdoc. Writing the PhD thesis, however, ended up taking much longer than planned (time management was a skill to be acquired later in life). At the same time, his partner became pregnant and soon a beautiful son entered their lives. Now a postdoc move required coordinating a small family.

An application for a postdoc position with Patrick Cavanagh at Harvard University was desk-rejected, and so Martin wrote a Marie Curie proposal to work with Marisa Carrasco at NYU. He had just submitted that proposal when he received an unsolicited invitation to come work with Patrick Cavanagh at his new lab in Paris. The whole family moved to Paris, a city they had never been to and that spoke a language they had never learned. Living in Paris with a family was basically impossible on a postdoc salary, and every cent was turned before it was spent. But at least childcare was free and decent and Martin’s wife Claudia was able to start working on her PhD.

Working with Patrick in a new lab, on topics that he had never worked on was a defining experience for Martin. Other postdocs in the lab had done their PhD in vision science and there was so much to learn from everyone around. It was almost a blessing to learn after only a few months in Paris that the Marie Curie did not get funded. But resubmission after revision was encouraged, and one year later, Martin was received a positive funding decision. Leaving Paris at that moment, however, would have toppled all the projects he had started. He postponed the start date of the Marie Curie by one year and left Paris after 2 years of postdoc for New York.

NYU was an absolute hotspot in vision science and provided small, but beautiful apartments for their postdocs. After a few administrative hurdles, the funding situation worked out well so that life in New York was less austere than life in Paris. Both postdocs lead to highly visible publications — papers that would be the basis of becoming a principal investigator — but each of these papers was rejected several times before it found a journal home. Perseverance is indeed one of the main requirements for a successful career in science.

In 2012, after a short postdoc with Eric Castet in Marseille (funded as part of the Marie Curie), Martin received funding for an Emmy Noether independent junior research group and started his own lab at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The Emmy Noether program was fantastic: It provided funding for five years and lots of support from the DFG, culminating in well-organized annual networking meetings with peers that helped navigate the difficulties of being a PI for the first time. But the program did not lead to tenure. Getting a permanent job meant applying to the few positions that were on the German market and considering another move abroad. After half a dozen job talks, two exciting offers materialized — one in Germany and one in the US — causing HU Berlin to offer a tenure track on a Heisenberg professorship. Martin turned down the other offers. Finally having a perspective in Berlin opened many doors, and things have worked out really well since then (mostly thanks to a phenomenal team). In particular, the long-term commitment from the university made coordinating work and family (including a new-born daughter) much easier.