Hannah Monyer (born 3 October 1957 in Laslea, Romania) is a Romanian-born (Transylvanian Saxon) German neurobiologist and, since 1999, she has been Director of the Department of Clinical Neurology at the University Hospital in Heidelberg. In 2004 she was awarded the 1.55 million euro Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. She received the Philip Morris Research Prize in 2006. In 2010, the European Research Council awarded her a total of 1.87 million euros for her research.
Her research has examined the composition of NMDA receptors and their expression patterns in brain cell populations. NMDA receptors are relevant to synaptic plasticity and ultimately to the brain’s capacity to remember and learn. She has also shown that there are different kinds of glutamate receptor, studied various neurological disorders, and the modulation of gamma-Aminobutyric acid interneurones in a genetic paradigm. She developed the new techniques in molecular analysis that underlie her work.
