Johannes Gräff
Swiss neuroscientist (born 1978)
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Education and career
Johannes Gräff was born and raised in St.Gallen, Switzerland, where he attended high-school at the Kantonsschule am Burggraben. He completed his undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Lausanne. During this time, he also spent one year at the University of British Columbia, where he started to become interested in neuroscience and psychology. His M.Sc. thesis, conducted with Laurent Keller in 2005, focused on the genetic causes of aging in ants. From 2005 to 2009, he completed his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETHZ) in the lab of Isabelle Mansuy working on neuroepigenetic mechanisms that regulate learning and memory. In 2009, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to start his postdoctoral work under the supervision of Li-Huei Tsai at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, focussing on a better understanding of the epigenetic processes underlying Alzheimer's disease and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Johannes Gräff was appointed Assistant Professor on Tenure Track at the Brain Mind Institute of the School of Life Sciences at EPFL in 2013, continuing his research on the neuroepigenetic basis of learning and memory. He was promoted to Associate professor in September 2020.
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Research
As a PhD student in Isabelle Mansuy's laboratory, Johannes Gräff identified the first protein phosphatase to regulate epigenetic mechanisms during learning and memory and demonstrated that epigenetic modifications are necessary for the spatiotemporal dynamics of memory consolidation.
As a postdoc in Li-Huei Tsai's laboratory, he showed that epigenetic mechanisms are causally involved in cognitive decline associated with neurodegeneration, as well as with the attenuation of long-term traumatic memories in a mouse model of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In his laboratory at EPFL’s Brain Mind Institute, he continues to work on deciphering the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory formation, storage and change. To investigate these, his lab focuses on the emerging field of neuroepigenetics. Epigenetic mechanisms have not only been shown to react to fluctuating environmental contingencies, but also to encode cellular fate during development. Owing to this property of being at once dynamic and stable, Gräff's laboratory hypothesizes that epigenetic mechanisms have the potential to better understand the molecular processes that drive memory formation, storage and loss. The laboratory also explores new ways to counteract memory impairment such as in Alzheimer’s disease, and in disorders such as PTSD.
Johannes Gräff's laboratory discovered the first methylation quantitative trait locus associated with Alzheimer's disease, and identified the brain areas as well as the cellular subpopulations important for the extinction of long-lasting traumatic memories.
Extracurricular activities
Since 2007, Johannes Gräff has been a regular contributor to the science section of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, covering neuroscientific and psychological topics. He has been a regular speaker at the Brain Awareness Week since 2016.