Prof. Dr. Marlene Bartos from the University of Freiburg and speaker of the SFB/TRR 384 IN-CODE has secured a €2.5 million ERC grant for her ambitious new project, “ReMember-CA3”. This multidisciplinary research tackles a fundamental question in systems neuroscience: how does the brain successfully encode new experiences without overwriting existing ones, and how does it reconstruct complete memories from tiny information fragments over time? By tracking the hippocampal CA3 region in behaving mice, Bartos and her team aim to map the exact circuit mechanisms driving episodic memory formation and recall. This work promises to significantly advance our baseline understanding of cognitive flexibility, while also providing an essential framework for identifying circuit-level breakdowns in neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.