Raunak Sinha, a postdoc in the laboratory of Fred Rieke, was awarded this year’s Otto Hahn Medal for his graduate work on ‘Optical analysis of synaptic vesicle protein molecules during exo- and endocytosis using pH-switchable fluorescent probes’. With the Otto Hahn Medal, the Max Planck Society recognizes ~30 young scientists each year for their outstanding scientific achievements.

Raunak carried out his PhD thesis work in the Dept. of Membrane Biophysics headed by Erwin Neher at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Goettingen, Germany, where he used novel optical approaches to address key questions on synaptic vesicle exocytosis and recycling.