Katharina Hohlbaum
Postdoctoral researcher
mail: katharina.hohlbaum@fu-berlin.de
phone: +49 30 838 50910 or +49 30 314 22248
Katharina Hohlbaum is a veterinarian with the focus on animal welfare, animal behavior, and laboratory animal science. She studied veterinary medicine at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover and received her PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2018. In her PhD project, she developed a protocol on the systematic assessment of well-being in mice that can be used to assess the severity of a procedure including general anesthesia in an animal-based and objective manner. Within SCIoI she is working as a postdoctoral researcher on the projects “Mouse Lock Box” and “Understanding learning of mice in social interaction” dealing with individual and social intelligence (i.e. learning in a group or from a tutor) in mice. She is investigating problem-solving strategies of mice on the analytical side of SCIoI. Data will then be used to develop a simulation on the synthetical side, which can raise new hypotheses regarding learning strategies of mice. Moreover, Katharina is interested in the interaction of emotions and cognition. Although great progress has been made in recognizing negative affective states of mice, little is known about their positive affective states. Therefore, Katharina aims to identify indicators of positive emotions in mice. She is exploring whether mice can discriminate between different emotional states and whether (and how) the emotional state of conspecifics influences the emotional state of an individual or induces empathy. This raises the questions how emotional signaling is involved in social learning.
At SCIoI, Katharina is working on Project 03, and Project 40, Project 46.