Ruxandra Sireteanu (1945–2008)

Ruxandra Sireteanu, a leading researcher in experimental and clinical visual neuroscience, died on September 1, 2008 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. At the height of her academic and scientific career, shortly before her 63rd birthday, she unexpectedly passed away following brain trauma. Ruxandra Sireteanu is best known in the scientific community for her pioneering work on neural plasticity and the negative consequences of squinting leading to strabismic amblyopia. Ruxandra Sireteanu grew up in Romania, where she developed an early interest in science, foreign languages and cultures. Following her school education, Ruxandra enrolled at the University of Bucharest, where she studied physics in the years 1963–1968. In the Department of Biophysics she completed her thesis entitled ‘‘Theoretical and Experimental Aspects of the Resting Membrane Potential”. Ruxandra remained at the same University, working over the next 4 years as a research scientist. In 1972 she moved to the renowned Laboratorio di Neurofisiologia del CNR in Pisa, Italy, to the laboratory of Lamberto Maffei, where she worked together with Adriana Fiorentini, Donatella Spinelli and Silvia Bisti. She received her doctoral degree in biophysics from the Scuola Normale Superiore in the year 1976 with the thesis entitled ‘‘Contributions to the Study of the Visual Function, using Spatially Periodical Stimuli”. In the same year she took up a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Ulm in Germany and was afterwards at the Institut d’Anatomie, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Between the years 1978–1981 Ruxandra worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich in the group of Wolf Singer. In 1983 she was nominated for the position of Associate Professor (tenured) at the School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley (USA). Ruxandra was afterwards promoted to Group Leader at the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, where she collaborated with Singer and other leading neuroscien-