Constance Scharff facts for kids

Constance Scharff (born in 1959) is a German scientist who studies animals and their brains. She is a professor at the Free University of Berlin. She is well-known for her important research on how birds sing, how brains make new cells, and how they can repair themselves.

Growing Up and Becoming a Scientist

Constance Scharff grew up in Lübeck, Germany. In 1979, she moved to Marburg, Germany, to study biology. Later, she studied how brains work at Adelphi University in New York.

From 1984, she worked with a famous scientist named Fernando Nottebohm at Rockefeller University. There, she earned her Ph.D. degree. They studied how birds learn to sing. During their research, they made an amazing discovery: adult brains can create new neurons (brain cells). This was a big surprise because, at the time, most scientists believed that brains were born with a fixed number of cells that couldn't be replaced.

In 1991, she moved to Paris to work at a research institute. She returned to New York in 1994 to work with Nottebohm again. From 2001 to 2005, she led a research group in Berlin. In 2005, she became a professor at the Free University of Berlin.

What She Studies

Constance Scharff studies how birds like canaries and zebra finches learn to sing. She looks at how their brains control this learning and how they communicate using sounds. Her work also focuses on how adult birds' brains can repair themselves and grow new cells.

She helped scientists understand the genetic code of the zebra finch. Her research also showed that a gene called FOXP2 is very important for learning sounds in both birds and humans. This discovery could help us better understand problems with speech that people are born with.

Since 2012, Professor Scharff has been a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2019, she also became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. These are groups of important scientists.

Her Family

Constance Scharff has two daughters with her husband, Arturo Zychlinsky, who is also a scientist.