Dr Benedikt Berninger is currently a professor of Physiological Chemistry at the University Medical Center of the University Mainz. Benedikt received his doctoral degree in 1996 at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich for work on activity-dependent regulation of neurotrophin gene expression. He then joined the lab of Professor Mu-ming Poo as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego to study fast actions of neurotrophins on synapses and growth cones. After a brief stay at the Karolinska Institute, Benedikt returned to Munich and eventually obtained a position as senior lecturer at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. In 2012 he received a call to the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.

The work of his laboratory focuses on lineage progression of adult neural stem cells, the functional integration of adult-generated neurons into pre-existing circuits, and on direct conversion of brain resident cells into induced neurons.