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Sven Dorkenwald

Sven Dorkenwald joined the Allen Institute and the University of Washington as a Shanahan Fellow in September 2023. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics and a Masters degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. While in Heidelberg, he worked on automated image analysis in connectomics with Jörgen Kornfeld in the department of Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. Sven received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Neuroscience from Princeton University, where he worked with Sebastian Seung and Mala Murthy. During his PhD, he developed approaches for the reconstruction and analysis of neuronal circuits from Electron Microscopy images and spearheaded the FlyWire consortium effort that produced a synapse-resolution connectome of an adult Drosophila brain. As a student researcher at Google Researcher, Sven devised a self-supervised machine learning approach for efficient annotation of cell reconstructions. As a Shanahan Fellow, Sven is working on the analysis of new and emerging connectomics datasets while pursuing new ways to integrate them with neuroscience datasets from other domains to enable multi-modal analyses.

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publication / 2025
The synaptic architecture of layer 5 thick tufted excitatory neurons in mouse visual cortex
Nature Neuroscience
publication / 2025
An unsupervised map of excitatory neuron dendritic morphology in the mouse visual cortex
Nature Communications
publication / 2025
CAVE: Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine
Nature Methods

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Serendipity and Synapses: How a part-time job unlocked a passion for brain-mapping
For Sven Dorkenwald, Ph.D., mapping the brain's connections was more than a job; it became a passion sparked by a simple twist of fate.

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