Henrique von Gersdorff earned a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Stony Brook University in New York. He received his B.S. in Physics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was a research scientist in high-energy physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and had postdoctoral fellowships at Stony Brook University and the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Department of Membrane Biophysics, Göttingen. In 1998 he was appointed assistant scientist in the Vollum Institute and was promoted to scientist in 2004 and senior scientist in 2009. von Gersdorff also holds a faculty appointment in the Physiology and Pharmacology department at OHSU.

The von Gersdorff lab is focused on sensory neuroscience research, primarily the auditory and visual systems. Sensory information is conveyed by neurons and synapses specialized to faithfully transmit large amounts of information at high rates. The lab uses patch clamp electrophysiology and calcium imaging techniques to study the synaptic physiology in the auditory hair cell synapses, the specialized synapses in the auditory brainstem, and the ribbon-type synapses of the retina.