Biosketches
Janne Adolf is a pre-doctoral fellow of the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course and affiliated with the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She studied Psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and, as an exchange student, at the University of Amsterdam. She completed her studies with a diploma thesis on measurement invariance in within- and between-person structural equation models in relation to the concept of ergodicity. In her dissertation project, which is supervised by Florian Schmiedek and Manuel Voelkle, she investigates theoretical principles and methodological strategies that integrate the within- and the between-person perspective on psychological phenomena.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: adolf@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
John Ashburner is a professor of imaging science at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. He has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from University College London (UK), where he held positions as lecturer, senior lecturer and reader before taking his current job. Prof. Ashburner is co-author (contributed about 45,000 lines of code) of SPM – a widely-used software package for modelling functional and structural neuroimaging data. He has over 14,000 citations and an H-index of 60. His research is primarily in imaging science, focusing on developing models for image registration, segmentation, computational anatomy and pattern recognition.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
Functional Imaging Laboratory
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: j.ashburner@ucl.ac.uk
Dominik R. Bach is Professor for Clinical Psychiatry Research at University of Zurich. He is a trained psychiatrist, and obtained an MSc and PhD in experimental psychology, followed by a BSc in maths. For his postdoctoral fellowship, he joined the group of Ray Dolan at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (University College London) where he trained in fMRI, MEG and mathematical methods. His group's current research interest is the computational and comparative neuroscience of emotion, and its application to psychiatric disorder.
Contact:
Zurich University Hospital for Psychiatry
Comparative Emotion Group
Lenggstrasse 31
8032 Zurich
Switzerland
E-mail: dominik.bach@uzh.ch
Andreas Brandmaier acquired his PhD in computer science in 2012. Currently, he is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and head of the Formal Methods in Lifespan Psychology project. The project is dedicated to developing multivariate mathematical, statistical, and computational research tools that accommodate complex research designs with multimodal assessments collected over a wide range of timescales. In this context, Andreas has been investigating approaches to integrate machine learning techniques into the workflow of psychological data analysis. To this end, he focuses on methods of theory-guided exploration of empirical data, particularly, on multivariate and longitudinal data arising in lifespan research. He proposed Structural Equation Model Trees as one particular analysis technique suitable for hypothesis-constraint exploration of large data sets. Lately, Andreas started to work on model selection and combination for the analysis of high-dimensional EEG data. Andreas is co-author of several scientific software packages, including Ωnyx, a graphical statistical modelling software, and pdc and semtree, two R packages for exploratory data analysis.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: brandmaier@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Michael Breakspear is interested in the basic principles of large-scale brain dynamics, how these arise from (and reshape) cortical architectures, and how they underpin cognitive operations, such as perception, inference and motor control.
As a psychiatrist, he also hopes to contribute to the understanding of major mental illnesses such as mood disorders, schizophrenia, autism and dementia. These contribute strongly to the burden of illness in all societies and cause significant distress to those affected.
He believes advancing our understanding of these disorders requires that we employ - and further advance - cutting edge mathematical and neuroscience techniques. This is why we focus on these techniques in our group, as well as their applications.
He is Group Leader of the Systems Neuroscience Group at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. He is also a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Queensland and a Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney.
Contact:
Queensland Institute of Medical Research
QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute
Locked Bag 2000
Royal Brisbane Hospital
Herston, QLD 4029
Australia
E-mail: Michael.Breakspear@qimrberghofer.edu.au
Roshan Cools is Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen). Her primary research interests are incentive motivation, cognitive control and decision making, behavioural functions of the major ascending neuromodulators dopamine and serotonin, and cognitive neurochemical imaging. She studied experimental psychology at Groningen, received her doctorate from Cambridge (UK) (2003) and completed postdocs at Cambridge and UC Berkeley. She has obtained numerous personal fellowships, awards and prizes (e.g. the 2012 Young Investigator Award of the Cognitive Neuroscience society), currently holds a James McDonnell scholar award and is a member of the Advisory Council to the Dutch government for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy.
Contact:
Donders Institute for Brain
Cognition and Behaviour
Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging
Kapittelweg 29
6500 HB Nijmegen
The Netherlands
E-mail: roshan.cools@donders.ru.nl
Website: www.roshancools.com
Cancelled
Philip R. Corlett is Director of the Belief, Learning and Memory Lab in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. His primary research interests are the neural and behavioural mechanisms of psychiatric symptoms, with a focus on psychosis and delusions. He studied Natural Sciences at Selwyn College, Cambridge, specializing in Experiemental Psychology and received his doctorate in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge in 2006. He was awarded the International Mental Health Research Organization Rising Star Award in 2013.
Contact:
Yale University
Department of Psychiatry
Ribicoff Research Facility
Connecticut Mental Health Center
34 Park Street
New Haven, CT 06410
USA
E-mail: philip.corlett@yale.edu
Website: http://medicine.yale.edu/labs/corlett/
Peter Dayan is Professor and Director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge followed by a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in associative memory and reinforcement learning. He completed Postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute and the University of Toronto, then became an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to UCL. He builds mathematical and computational models of neural processing, with a particular emphasis on representation and learning.
Contact:
University College London
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit
Alexandra House, Room 407
17 Queen Square
London WC1N 3AR
United Kingdom
E-mail: dayan@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk
Prof. Dr. phil. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Gustavo Deco is Research Professor at the Institucio Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avanats and Full Professor (Catedratico) the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) where he is head of the Computational Neuroscience Group and Director of the Center of Brain and Cognition.
He studied Physics at the National University of Rosario (Argentina) where he received his diploma degree in Theoretical Atomic Physics. In 1987, he received his Ph.D. degree in Physics for his thesis on Relativistic Atomic Collisions. In 1987, he was a post doctoral fellow at the University of Bordeaux in France. In the period from 1988 to 1990, he obtained a post doctoral position of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Giessen in Germany. From 1990 to 2003, he has been with the Neural Computing Section at the Siemens Corporate Research Center in Munich, Germany, where he led the Computational Neuroscience Group.
In 1997, he obtained his habilitation (maximal academical degree in Germany) in Computer Science (Dr. Rer. Nat. Habil.) at the Technical University of Munich for his thesis on Neural Learning. In 2001, he received his PhD in Psychology (Dr. phil.) for his thesis on Visual Attention at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich.
He was lecturer at the universities of Rosario, Frankfurt and Munich. Since 1998 he is Associate Professor at the Technical University of Munich and Honorary Professor at the University of Rosario, and since 2001 Invited Lecturer at the Ludwig-Maximilian- University of Munich. Since 2001 he is also McDonnell- Pew Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford.In 2001 he was awarded the international price of Siemens "Inventor of the Year" for his contribution in statistical learning, models of visual perception, and fMRI based diagnosis of neuropsychiatric diseases.
His research interests include computational neuroscience, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, biological networks, statistical formulation of neural networks, and chaos theory.
He has published 4 books, more than 190 papers in International Journals, 260 papers in International Conferences and 30 book chapters. He has also 52 patents in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan. Recently, he was awarded with the “Advanced ERC” grant.
Contact:
Center for Brain and Cognition
Universitat Pompeu Fabra / ICREA
C\ Tanger, 122-140
08018 Barcelona
Spain
E-mail: gustavo.deco@upf.edu
Website: cns.upf.edu
Stavros I. Dimitriadis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1978. He received the Bachelor and Master degrees (with highest honors) in Informatics both from the Aristotele University of Thessaloniki, in 2008 an 2010, respectively. He got the Ph.D. in Neuroinformatics (2013) from an interdepartmental program (Medicine, Biology and Physics department) of Master Studies calles "Electronics and processing of Information, University of Patras, Greece. During 2012 he also served as a Visiting Researcher at the Laboratory of Human Brain Dynamics (LHBM), Nikosia, Cyprus. During 2013 he served as a Visiting Researcher at the SINAPSE Institute, Singapore. Now he is a Post-Doc in Artificial Intelligence Information Analysis, Dept. of Informatics, Aristotele University of Thessaloniki (Greece) His current research interests include: Biosignal Analysis, NeuroInformatics, Computational Intelligence in Biomedicine, Modelling of brain functional connectivity networks in health and disease, detection of reliable biomarkers for the prevention of brain disorders, Cognitive Neurodynamics, Cognitive Neuroscience and its applications, Brain Connectomics. He has co-authored 15 journal papers and 8 Conference Papers. He is a reviewer in more than 10 high-quality papers including: Brain & Cognition, Biological Psychology, Brain Topography, Cognitive Neurodynamics, Neuroscience Letters etc. His scientific network is extended (apart from Greece) to include the USA (Tennessee, Houston, New York), Asia (Singapore) and also Europe (UK, Amsterdam, Switzerland). His Ph.D. was awarded as the best in Greece for 2013 by the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) - formerly known as Informatics and Telematics Institute – Thessaloniki – Greece.
Contact:
Artificial Intelligence Information Analysis Lab
Department of Informatics
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
54124 Thessaloniki
Greece
E-mail: stidimitriadis@gmail.com
Website: http://users.auth.gr/~stdimitr/index.html
Neuroinformatics group: http://neuroinformatics.web.auth.gr/
Raymond J. Dolan is Mary Kinross Professor of Neuropsychiatry at UCL and Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL. He is likewise co-director of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. His research is concerned with a neurobiological characterisation of human emotion and decision making. He holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2010 and an External Member of the Max Planck Society in 2012.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: r.dolan@ucl.ac.uk
Charles Driver studied psychological science at the University of Queensland in Australia, with an honours dissertation regarding memory for choices, and also spent some time at the University of Amsterdam. His investigation of dynamic models of mood at the latter led to his current directions, in which he is working with Manuel Voelkle, applying both continuous and discrete time dynamic models to a variety of questions regarding the long term development and structural relationships of subjective well-being, as well as further developing continuous time structural equation models. He is also particularly interested in strategies for improved causal inference from observational data over time, as well as reproducible and collaborative research approaches.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: driver@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Emrah Düzel was trained as a neurologist in Germany (in Bonn and Magdeburg) and has a long-standing interest in the functional anatomy of human episodic memory networks, neuromodulatory circuits, their alterations in ageing and neurodegeneration, and their scope for plasticity. For this purpose, his group uses and advances multimodal imaging techniques including fMRI, EEG / MEG and PET. He and his group are particularly interested in how the degeneration of dopaminergic and noradrenergic neurotransmitter systems contribute to cognitive dysfunction in old age by impacting on motivation, decision making, memory consolidation, and plasticity. They approach this problem from the vantage point of how declarative memory processes, motivation, and decision making interact.
Other affiliations:
Site Speaker of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Magdeburg site, Helmholtz Society
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Group leader (part time) UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience University College London, 17 Queen Square - London - WC1N 3AR
Contact:
Director, Institute of Cognitive Neurology and Dementia Research
Otto-von- Guericke Universität Magdeburg
Leipziger Str. 44
39120 Magdeburg
Germany
E-mail: emrah.duezel@dzne.de
Vincenzo G. Fiore joined the Functional Imaging Laboratory as a research associate under the supervision of Ray Dolan in January 2013. Before the FIL he worked for four years at the Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience at the CNR in Rome, as part of his PhD training. Today his main interest is in the functioning of the striato-cortical circuitry and its role in realising selections of actions and goals. He is currently working on the validation of a series of predictions which have resulted from the analysis of simulated activity in a bio-inspired artificial neural network, tested under different conditions of -simulated- dopamine release.
His background is in the field of philosophy of mind, cognitive science and psychobiology and he is particularly keen to use the connectionist approach in dealing with decision making, motivations, emotions, learning and conditioning in biological agents.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: v.fiore@ucl.ac.uk
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Angela Friederici studied Linguistics and Psychology, PhD 1976 at the University of Bonn, Germany, Postdoc at MIT, Cambridge (MA) USA, 1980–1989 Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands. 1989–1994 Professor of Cognitive Science at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. Since 1994 Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (formerly MPI of Cognitive Neuroscience) in Leipzig, Germany. Honorary professor at the Universities of Leipzig (Psychology), Potsdam (Linguistics) and Berlin (Medicine). Since June 2014 Vice President of the Human Sciences Section, Max Planck Society.
Science Awards: 1987 Heisenberg Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG), 1990 Alfried Krupp Award of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach-Stiftung, 1997 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Price of the German Research Foundation (DFG), 1999 Daimler Chrysler Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study Berlin, Germany. Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Member of the German Academy of Sciences 'Leopoldina' and Member of the Academia Europaea.
Main field of research: Neurocognition of Language
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Department of Neuropsychology
Stephanstr. 1a
04103 Leipzig
Germany
E-mail: truemper@cbs.mpg.de (PA Melanie Truemper)
Pascal Fries was born on 28 January 1972. Study of medicine at the University of Saarland (1991-1993) and at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt (1993 – 1998). Doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt (1993 – 1999). Postdoc in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA (1999 – 2001). Principal Investigator at Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands (2001-2009). Professor of Systems Neuroscience, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands (since 2008). Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology, Martinsried, and Director of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) in Cooperation with Max Planck Society, Frankfurt (since 2009). Pascal Fries studies the mechanisms, consequences and cognitive functions of neuronal synchronization.
Contact:
Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI)
Deutschordenstr. 46
60528 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
E-mail: office.fries@esi-frankfurt.de
Douglas D. Garrett (Ph.D., 2011) is leader of the Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group (LNDG) within the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, and is based at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Research within the LNDG examines how and why the human brain fluctuates so markedly from moment to moment. Perhaps counterintuitively, we continue to find that healthy, better functioning brains are characterized by greater signal variability across broad brain regions, cognitive domains, and task types. We examine brain signal variability and dynamics in relation to six core research foci: lifespan development, cognition, neuromodulation, structural/functional connectivity, transcranial stimulation, and modelling/methods. Accordingly, we have an inherent multivariate focus that allows the examination of brain signal variability phenomena across multiple levels of analysis.
Contact:
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: garrett@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Website: www.douglasdgarrett.com
Marc Guitart-Masip is a research associate working at the Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institute, Sweden where he has recently established himself as an independent scientist and is building his own research group. In parallel he is training as a clinical psychiatrist at the North West Psychiatry Region in Stockholm, Sweden. He graduated with a degree in medicine in 2002 from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and obtained a PhD in Neuroscience at the same university in 2006. While working on his PhD, he performed experiments in the field of Behavioural and Molecular Pharmacology using animal models of vulnerability to addiction. After obtaining a PhD, his interests expanded to Cognitive Neuroscience and between 2008 and 2012 he was a postdoctoral fellow first at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and thereafter at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, at University College London (UCL).
He has two main research interests: First, to understand the role of neuromodulators like dopamine and serotonin in motivational process and decision-making. Second, to understand the role of the human hippocampus in the generation of adaptive responses in the context of anxiety or novelty. He combines behavioural approaches, computational modelling, pharmacological manipulations and imaging techniques such as fMRI, PET and MEG. His long- term goal is to apply the advances of cognitive and computational neuroscience to the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic tools for psychiatry disorders.
Contact:
Aging Research Center
Karolinska Institutet
Gävlegatan 16
SE-113 30 Stockholm
Sweden
E-mail: marc.guitart-masip@ki.se
Hauke Heekeren is Professor of Affective Neuroscience and Psychology of Emotion at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is deputy director of the Cluster of Excellence „Languages of Emotion“ at the Freie Universität Berlin and Co- Director of the Dahlem Institute for the Neuroimaging of Emotions. Since obtaining his doctoral degree in September of 2000 for his work on neurovascular coupling, the major focus of his work has been human decision neuroscience. Hauke has received the Rudolph Virchow Award for excellence in research from the Charité (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) as well as the Emmy-Noether-Award by the German Research Council (DFG). He is the founding editor of the journal Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience and currently the Chief Editor of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. He is also a past President of the Society for Neuroeconomics. Hauke’s research program ranges from perceptual to reward-based decision-making and decision-making in social contexts. In his work, he also seeks to further the understanding of neuropsychiatric conditions that involve socio-emotional impairments, such as autism, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. Hauke uses a multimodal methodological approach that integrates information from an array of methods, ranging from cognitive modelling based on behavioural data to simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and encephalographic (EEG/MEG) experiments as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Contact:
Freie Universität Berlin
Department of Education and Psychology
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: hauke.heekeren@fu-berlin.de
Website: www.fu-berlin.de/scan
Ralph Hertwig has made important contributions to answer the question of how people make decisions, if time is limited, information unreliable, and the future uncertain. The focal point of his work lies in the analysis of the boundedly rational strategies (“heuristics”) that people use to make decisions under such circumstances. He was able to show that the natural boundaries of the human mind do not necessarily have to be a handicap and that simple heuristics can benefit from, for example, systematic forgetting processes. Relatedly, he has shown that simple heuristics can also be used in complex social contexts (for example, in parental investment decisions). His experimental demonstrations that our reasoning about risk and uncertainty depends strongly on whether people experience uncertain information sequentially or learn it in a symbolical summary format have stimulated numerous investigations.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Adaptive Rationality
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: sekhertwig@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Quentin Huys received his MA from Cambridge University and his PhD from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit with Peter Dayan. He was a postdoc at Columbia University, before obtaining his medical degree from UCL. He is a psychiatry trainee at the University of Zürich and a senior research fellow at the Translational Neuromodelling unit. He is interested in applying computational techniques to decision-making, particularly in the setting of mood disorders. This involves a combination of theoretical, behavioural, pharmacological and imaging techniques.
Contact:
Translational Neuromodeling Unit
Institute for Biomedical Engineering
University of Zurich and ETH Zurich
Wilfriedstrasse 6
8032 Zurich
Switzerland
E-mail: qhuys@biomed.ee.ethz.ch
Julian D. Karch is a PhD candidate in the Formal Methods in Lifespan Psychology project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He holds a diploma (equivalent to a Master degree) in computer science from the Freie Universität Berlin.
His research interests include machine learning, data mining, algorithms in psychology, statistical and algorithmic modelling, and statistical methods.
His current research focuses on the development of machine learning algorithms for theory-guided exploration of neuroscientific data sets. In his most recent work he proposed model selection and combination approaches for the classification of electroencephalographic data sets. He showed their superiority in comparison to traditional classification methods.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: karch@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Rogier Andrew Kievit studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, spending half a year at the University of Otago to study courses on neuroscience and political science. He then entered the research master’s program at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on methodology and cognitive neuroscience, spending 18 months at the Kosslyn lab at Harvard University working on mental rotation. In 2009 he started a PhD project with Denny Borsboom at the department of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam, working on developing statistical models to capture reductionist theories, receiving his PhD in 2014.
Currently, Rogier is postdoctoral research fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, working on the Cam-CAN ageing project with Professor Richard Henson. His current research relates brain function, brain structure and cognition in ageing populations using multivariate modelling techniques. Specifically, he uses a variety of structural equation models, including MIMIC models, hierarchical factor models and time-series analysis to capture the changing relationship between mind and brain across lifetime. Recent approaches have focused on studying individual differences in executive function across lifetime, modelling a developmental cascade of white matter and processing speed and examining the dimensionality of grey matter covariance in ageing populations using graph theory and SEM. With the goal of increasing health in older populations, Kievit’s particular interests are in models that effectively capture how cognitive changes across lifetime relate to brain reorganization, adaptation and compensation.
Contact:
MRC-Cognition and Brain Science Unit
15 Chaucer Road
Cambridge, CB2 7EF
United Kingdom
E-mail: Rogier.Kievit@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Simone Kühn is a cognitive neuroscientist with an interdisciplinary background. She studied psychology Columbia University in New York and University of Potsdam and obtained a Diploma in psychology. She started her doctoral thesis at the MPI in Leipzig with Wolfgang Prinz and Marcel Brass and continued at University of Ghent in Belgium. Her doctoral thesis explored the neural correlates of so called “voluntary non-action”, namely situations in which humans think about a certain act but refrain from actually doing it. Then she received a three-year post-doc grant from the Research Foundation Flanders and worked at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College of London with Patrick Haggard and with Jürgen Gallinat at Charité University Clinic in Berlin. Now she is a senior researcher leading the group „Mechanisms and Sequential Progression of Plasticity“ at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
She aims at addressing the research question of whether and how plasticity contributes to adult development. Additionally, she has a long-standing interest in research on mental disorders. One study that combines the twofold interests in plasticity in human development and in psychiatry investigates structural and functional neural changes in military soldiers when being deployed to Afghanistan. Moreover, she recently initiated several fMRI studies on patients suffering from schizophrenia with so-called ego-disturbances, who report to feel that their actions, or even their thoughts, are controlled by external forces.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: kuehn@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Zebulun Kurth-Nelson is currently working as a postdoc at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, and is a member of the Initiative for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research (ICPAR). He has two interrelated areas of interest: the neural and computational basis of impulsivity disorders, and the neural mechanisms of deliberative decision- making. Zebulun did his undergraduate degree in computer science at Iowa State University and his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: z.kurth-nelson@ucl.ac.uk
Máté Lengyel obtained his MSc in Cell, Developmental and Neuroscience in 2000, and his PhD in Neurobiology in 2004, both at Eotvos University, Budapest. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL between 2004-2006. He was a visiting researcher at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, Budapest in 2007. He is a member of the faculty (Lecturer, 2007-2012, Reader, 2012-) at the Computational and Biological Learning Lab, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He received a Wellcome Trust New Investigator Award in 2011, has served on the programme committee of the Neural Information Processing Systems and the Computational and Systems Neuroscience conferences since 2010, and has been one of the directors of the FENS / IBRO Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience course since 2011.
Máté Lengyel's group studies learning and memory from computational, algorithmic/representational and neurobiological viewpoints. He also maintains an active interest in the possible computational functions of neural oscillations, particularly those present in the hippocampus and neocortex. Computationally and algorithmically, his research uses ideas from Bayesian approaches to statistical inference and reinforcement learning to characterize the goals and mechanisms of learning in terms of normative principles and behavioural results. His work also includes dynamical systems analyses of reduced biophysical models to understand the mapping of these mechanisms into cellular and network models. His group collaborates very closely with experimental neuroscience groups, doing in vitro intracellular recordings, multi-unit recordings in behaving animals, and human psychophysical and fMRI experiments.
Contact:
University of Cambridge
Department of Engineering
Computational and Biological Learning Lab
Trumpington Street
Cambridge CB2 1PZ
United Kingdom
E-mail: m.lengyel@eng.cam.ac.uk
Ulman Lindenberger is Director of the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany and co- director of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. His primary research interests are behavioural and neural plasticity across the lifespan, brain-behaviour relations across the lifespan, multivariate developmental methodology, and formal models of behavioural change. He studied psychology and biology at Berkeley and Berlin, and received his doctorate in psychology from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1990. He holds honorary professorships at Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2010.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: seklindenberger@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Rui Mata is an Assistant Professor for Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Basel, Switzerland, having received postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany, the University of Lisbon, Portugal, Stanford University, USA, and the University of Michigan, USA. His research focuses on the life span development of decision making under risk and uncertainty, with a particular focus on how ageing interacts with task characteristics to produce age differences in risk taking behaviour. For more information see www.cds.unibas.ch
Contact:
University of Basel
Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences
Room 112
Missionsstrasse 64A
4055 Basel
Switzerland
E-mail: rui.mata@unibas.ch
Christoph Mathys studied physics at ETH Zurich (master's thesis with Daniel Wyler), then ventured into the IT industry for several years, where he worked for a mobile applications company that he partly owned. After the sale of this company he returned to academia, where he completed a master's degree in psychology (University of Zurich, with Lutz Jäncke) while doing experimental work with Gottfried Schlaug at Harvard. He then returned to ETH Zurich to do his PhD with Klaas Enno Stephan. In the course of this, he developed the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter (HGF), a generic hierarchical Bayesian model of learning in volatile environments. Currently, he is a postdoc in Karl Friston’s group at University College London, funded by the MPS-UCL Joint Initiative on Computational Psychiatry. His focus is on failures in predictive coding and their relation to psychopathology.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: c.mathys@ucl.ac.uk
Peter Mohr is currently a Junior Professor for Information Processing and Economic Decision Making at the University of Constance. After studying Business Administration with a focus on Finance and Marketing, he did his PhD in psychology at the International Max Planck Research School LIFE. His current research interests lie in the fields of neuroeconomics, neuroeconomics and ageing, behavioural economics, and decision sciences in general. Specifically, he is interested in how risk processing and decision making under risk are affected by context and age, but also how strategic interactions between different individuals are neurally processed. In this context a special focus of his research lies in the interplay of emotion and cognition as well as on inter-individual differences in subjective perceptions of relevant decision variables like reward expectation, risk, and trust. From a methodological perspective he combines functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), quantitative meta-analyses of fMRI data, and behavioural modelling.
Contact:
Information Processing and EconomicDecision Making
Department of Psychology
Universität Konstanz
78457 Konstanz
Germany
E-mail: peter.mohr@uni-konstanz.de
Michael Moutoussis is interested in computational models of psychiatric disorders. Are the sufferings and satisfactions of an unwell brain the phenomenal correlates of inappropriate computations? And are the sufferings and satisfactions of a well brain the correlates of normative computations? These research interests are much informed by clinical experience, and thus give centre stage to clinical relevance and the suffering of the individual. Within our very promising field of computational psychiatry it is crucial to delineate with certainty which domains of normative information processing 'give way' in psychiatric disorders and which are only peripherally involved. His main clinical interests are `functional' somatic symptoms, psychosis and personality disorder. The latter two have inspired him to study the thinking behind paranoid delusions and also how people represent each other's minds. He now works on several aspects of the relation between basic information processing in the brain and high-level psychiatric symptoms.
In terms of biography, he was born and raised in Athens, Greece; he then studied Physics – his first love. He studied Medicine, physiology and psychiatric research methodology while carrying out early mathematical modelling relevant to psychiatry. He earned specialist medical registration as a psychiatrist in Psychotherapy. In his Ph.D. he carried out experimental (clinical- psychological) and computational (temporal-difference and ideal bayesian observer) studies of paranoid delusions. He lives in England with his (musician) wife and they have two adult children.
Contact:
Clinical Lecturer in Neuroscience and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: m.moutoussis@ucl.ac.uk
Yael Niv is assistant professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University. Her work utilizes computational models and empirical investigations of rat and human learning and decision making, as well as human neuroimaging, to investigate the processes of reinforcement learning in the brain. In particular, her lab focuses on understanding how reinforcement learning occurs in tasks of real-world complexity, e.g., how do we learn with highly multidimensional stimuli, from tasks that have hierarchical or other hidden structure, and how do learning predispositions affect this process.
Contact:
Psychology Department and Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Princeton University
Green Hall
Princeton, NJ
08544
USA
E-mail: yael@princeton.edu
Olga Therese Ousdal studied medicine at University of Oslo, and completed her PhD in biological psychiatry at the same university in 2012. She was awarded a postdoctoral grant from The Western Norway Regional Health Authority in 2012, and joined the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, as a clinical fellow in November 2013. Her research has focused on how the brain recognizes stimuli as valuable or relevant, and also how the brain codes the spatial location of valuable stimuli. Her current work addresses basic Pavlovian learning and the successful regulation of Pavlovian behaviours in both healthy subjects and patients suffering from anxiety disorders. In addition to pursuing research in biological psychiatry, Ousdal has completed 2.5 years of training in radiology, with a special interest in neuroradiology and radiological intervention.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: o.ousdal@ucl.ac.uk OR olgatherese.ousdal@gmail.com
Francesco Rigoli is currently a research associate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (UCL) working on value-based decision-making in Prof. Ray Dolan’s lab. His background involves experience in both clinical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. After a master in cognitive psychology at the University of Bologna he worked as a clinical cognitive psychologist in 2008-2009. In 2009-2012, during his PhD program, he developed his research project on Pavlovian decision-making jointly at the University of Siena, the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome, and the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. His current research interests are in combining computational modelling (mainly reinforcement learning and Bayesian statistics) and behavioural and neuroimaging techniques to investigate human value-based decision-making, and to connect this research to the new field of computational psychiatry.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: f.rigoli@ucl.ac.uk
Robb Rutledge is a Senior Research Associate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London in the group of Ray Dolan, and is a member of the Initiative for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research (ICPAR). His research uses pharmacological manipulations and measurements of neural activity to study how our brains respond to rewards using techniques from neuroscience, psychology, economics, and computer science. His recent research with Ray Dolan and Peter Dayan concerns the relationship between rewards, expectations, and subjective feelings in both healthy subjects and subjects suffering from depression.
Contact:
University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: robb.rutledge@ucl.ac.uk
Klaas Enno Stephan is Director and Founder of the Translational Neuromodelling Unit (TNU) at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich where he holds a Chair in Translational Neuromodelling. Additionally, he is a Principal Investigator and Co-Founder of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research (SNS) at the University of Zurich, an Honorary Principal at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, London, and External Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research, Cologne. Following doctoral degrees in Medicine (Düsseldorf University, with Rolf Kötter and Karl Zilles) and Neuroinformatics (Newcastle University, with Malcolm Young), Klaas worked as a post-doc in computational neuroscience with Karl Friston at London. His track record includes the development of the connectivity database CoCoMac, numerous studies of brain connectivity, and development of various neuroinformatics tools, e.g. Objective Relational Transformation, nonlinear dynamic causal models, and Bayesian model selection methods. He has published more than 140 peer-reviewed papers, and his work has been recognised by several awards, including the Wiley Young Investigator Award in Human Brain Mapping.
Klaas works on developing “computational assays” for inferring individual disease mechanisms from non-invasive measurements of brain activity and behaviour. The long-term goal is to use these models for a mechanistic re- definition of psychiatric and neurological diseases, leading to pathophysiologically interpretable diagnostic classifications and individual treatment predictions.
Contact:
University of Zurich & ETH Zurich
Institute for Biomedical Engineering
Wilfriedstrasse 6
8032 Zurich
Switzerland
E-mail: stephan@biomed.ee.ethz.ch
Website: www.translationalneuromodeling.org
Ulf Toelch trained as a biologist (ecology major) and his research focuses on decision-making processes, in particular, how information is processed and integrated to reduce environmental uncertainty. He addressed these questions in egg-laying parasitoids, flower-visiting bats, and humans. His current focus lies in decision-making processes under the influence of social information and norms in humans. This includes imaging, as well as computational approaches, to ultimately understand the cognitive underpinnings of human cultural evolution.
Contact:
Berlin School of Mind and Brain
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Luisenstrasse 56
10117 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: toelch@gmail.com
Arno Villringer studied medicine at Freiburg University (1977-1984). He performed experimental work for his thesis on the regulation of protein synthesis by small RNAs in the Biochemistry Department of Freiburg University (summa cum laude). In 1985 he joined the NMR group at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School where he worked on basic contrast mechanisms for magnetic resonance imaging and established susceptibility based contrast in animal studies. He trained in Neurology at University of Munich (1986-1992). From 1996 to 2003 he was consultant neurologist at the Charité University Hospital Berlin. From 2004 to 2007 he was head of the Department of Neurology at Benjamin Franklin Hospital, Charité. Since 2007 he has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Director of the Clinic for Cognitive Neurology at University Hospital, Leipzig. Since 1999 he has been coordinator of the German Competence Net Stroke and since 2006 speaker of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain.
His research focusses on stroke. Specifically, he is interested in pathological brain plasticity in hypertension and obesity leading to stroke and plasticity underlying sensorimotor recovery after stroke. Research studies are performed in humans employing noninvasive techniques such as structural and functional MRI, PET, EEG, EEG/fMRI, fNIRS, TMS, and TDCS.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Stephanstr. 1a
04103 Leipzig
Germany
E-mail: villringer@cbs.mpg.de
Manuel Völkle is a research scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Before joining the MPI, he worked at the University of Mannheim from where he received his diploma and doctorate degree. Manuel is particularly interested in the design and analysis of multivariate empirical studies with an emphasis on the use of structural equation models and longitudinal data analysis. Most of his methodological work is concerned with continuous-time modelling and the analysis of the intricate relationship of between- and within-person differences in psychological constructs as they evolve over time. His substantive research revolves around cognitive and affective development.
Contact:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Center for Lifespan Psychology
Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: voelkle@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Gabriel Ziegler is a PostDoc and Honorary Visitor of the Computational Anatomy and Genetics Group (with head John Ashburner) at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London. He received his Diploma Degree in Psychology from the University of Jena. His Diploma thesis explored functional integration in a visual search fMRI task. In addition he received a B.S. in mathematics with a thesis investigating the invariance of phase information in independent component analysis. From 2007 to 2008 hewas a research assistant in the Autonomic Function Group at the Department of Psychiatry in Jena working on resting state fMRI coupling to autonomic correlates. Since 2008/2009 Gabriel has focused on the development and application of models of ageing brainstructure using computational morphometry. His dissertation on ''Lifespan brain structural trajectories and individual differences of growth and decline'' explores brain structural differences and changes in early, middle and later life. Currently, he is involved in generative and predictive decline modelling using longitudinal MRI data, estimation of individual decline parameters, and quantifying its disease progression. His research interests involve hierarchical modelling, multivariate analysis, Bayesian inference as well as Gaussian process models in context of development, ageing and dementia.
Contact:
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
Institute of Neurology
University College London
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom
E-mail: g.ziegler@ucl.ac.uk