This year's Young Investigator Award from the Anatomical Society was awarded to Amelie Eichler, Institute for Neuroanatomy and Cell Biology. The award ceremony took place at the annual meeting of the specialist society in Graz. Every year, the Anatomical Society honors outstanding work by young scientists with the prize. Amelie Eichler received the prize for her dissertation entitled “Activity-dependent regulation of the structure and function of microglia in nervous tissue”. In this work she investigated the essential influence of microglia – the resident immune cells of the CNS – on synaptic transmission and plasticity. She was able to show that activity-dependent release of cytokines during non-invasive brain stimulation is significantly involved in synaptic adaptation reactions. Their work thus provides novel insights into the role of cellular interactions in maintaining physiological conditions in neuronal networks. Since September 2023, Ms. Eichler has been working at the Institute for Neuroanatomy and Cell Biology at the Hannover Medical School, where she heads the “Neuroinfection and Immunology” working group.