2019 Conference

Helen Mayberg, MD is Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and the Mount Sinai Professor in Neurotherapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine.

Known for studies of brain circuits in depression and for her pioneering deep brain stimulation research, Dr. Mayberg moved to New York in 2018 as the Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics, where she leads a patient-focused research team of neurologists, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, neuroscientists and engineers with the shared mission to advance precision surgical treatments for complex neuropsychiatric disorders.

Over her career, her work has characterized neural systems mediating major depression and its recovery, defined imaging-based illness subtypes to optimize treatment selection and introduced the first use of DBS for treatment resistant patients.

Dr. Mayberg received a BA in Psychobiology from UCLA and a MD from University of Southern California. She then completed her neurology residency at the Neurological Institute of New York at Columbia University followed by fellowship training in nuclear medicine at Johns Hopkins. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors, and has authored more than 220 peer-reviewed publications and participates in a wide variety of advisory and scientific activities across multiple fields in neuroscience.

Hartwig Roman Siebner is head of the Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance (DRCMR) at Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre and full professor for Precision Medicine at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen. He is a board certified neurologist and has worked as research fellow at Technische Universität München (TUM, Germany, 1995-2002) and University College London (UCL, UK, 2000-2002), and professor / principal investigator at Christian Albrechts University Kiel (CAU, Germany) and NeuroImage-Nord (Hamburg-Kiel-Lübeck, Germany, 2002-2008).

Hartwig Roman Siebner is a brain network scientist and combines functional and structural brain imaging with interventional protocols such as non-invasive transcranial brain stimulation (NTBS), pharmacological challenges, or training. He uses this combined intervention-mapping approach to infer causal brain dynamics in motor and cognitive brain networks and to gain insights into brain plasticity as well as the pathophysiology of brain diseases (movement disorders, multiple sclerosis). Combining EEG and TMS, his recent research is focusing on Biophysically Adjusted, State-Informed Brain Stimulation (BASICS). He also systematically explored peripheral co-stimulation during NTBS and its implication for the scientific use of NTBS. Current research is geared to transform NTBS into a precision therapy for personalized treatment of brain circuit disorders.

Professor Tim Denison holds a joint appointment in Engineering Science and Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford, where he explores the fundamentals of physiologic closed-loop systems. Prior to that, Tim was a Technical Fellow at Medtronic PLC and Vice President of Research & Core Technology for the Restorative Therapies Group, where he helped oversee the design of next generation neural interface and algorithm technologies for the treatment of chronic neurological disease.

In 2012, he was awarded membership to the Bakken Society, Medtronic’s highest technical and scientific honor, and in 2014 he was awarded the Wallin leadership award, becoming only the second person in Medtronic history to receive both awards.  In 2015, he was elected to the College of Fellows for the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Tim received an A.B. in Physics from The University of Chicago, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT.

He recently completed his MBA and was named a Wallman Scholar at Booth, The University of Chicago.

Axel Thielscher obtained doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Sciences, both “with highest honor”, from the University of Ulm (Germany). This was followed by a PostDoc stay at Brown University (Providence, RI) and a position as research group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybnernetics (Tübingen, Germany). Currently, Axel holds a shared position as Associate Professor at the Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance (Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre, Denmark) and the Technical University of Denmark (Kgs. Lyngby).

Axel’s research interests are the interface of engineering with neuroscience research and applications. This includes the integration of brain stimulation with brain imaging modalities as well as computational dosimetry approaches for brain stimulation. He is the founder of the SimNIBS project (Simulation of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation) that developed the first open-source software pipeline for individualized FEM calculations for brain stimulation based on MR images, and that is now widely used in the field. He leverages these methods and integrates them with neuroimaging to characterize and improve target engagement during brain stimulation and to understand the mechanisms of action by which brain stimulation modulates neural activity.

Caroline Di Bernardi Luft is cognitive neuroscientist and a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She directs the EEG and brain stimulation laboratory at Queen Mary, focusing on the combination of psychophysiological, neuroimaging and brain stimulation methods. Her work combines neuroimaging and brain stimulation methods to understand cognition, especially learning and creativity. She is dedicated to understanding the brain mechanisms behind learning and creativity by combining EEG and transcranial direct and alternating current brain stimulation (tDCS and tACS). Her approach involves applying advanced signal processing techniques to investigate local and global brain synchronization in cognitive tasks and in response to brain stimulation at rest and during a number of different paradigms. She is also interested in understanding how people’s brains synchronize with each other and is currently developing studies using hyperscanning techniques to understand group creativity.

Danny graduated from the University of California Irvine with a B.S. with a degree in Biomedical Engineering and subsequently earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins Medical Institute. His thesis work was guided by Dr. Pablo Celnik, where his topic was in understanding the physiological mechanisms underlying motor skill learning by utilizing a variety of behavioral tools and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques. He is now a Post-Doctoral fellow under the mentorship of Brainbox Initiative Scientific Committee member John Rothwell working on a variety of research topics related to motor control, motor learning and retention, and neurophysiology in healthy young adults that can be utilized to develop interventions that promote motor learning in people recovering from neurological illness or injury.

Dr. Eleonore Smalle is a cognitive neuroscientist at Ghent University, who is interested in why children are better in learning languages than adults.

She completed her doctoral degree in Psychology at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, under supervision of Prof. Arnaud Szmalec. She also trained with Dr. Riikka Möttönen at the University of Oxford on transcranial magnetic stimulation approaches to examine speech processing and language learning. Currently, Eleonore is based at Ghent University where she is working with Prof. Wouter Duyck on studying cognitive mechanisms in language acquisition. She is also intensively collaborating with Dr. Riikka Möttönen’s lab at the University of Nottingham. Together, they are investigating the neural mechanisms supporting language learning in adults by combining EEG, TMS and behavioural tasks.

Gesa Hartwigsen is an independent research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI-CBS) in Leipzig.

Her research group Cognition and Plasticity focuses on adaptive plasticity in neural networks for cognition across the adult life span. Gesa combines non-invasive brain stimulation with neuroimaging and EEG to study plasticity and compensation in the healthy young and aging brain and in patients with brain lesions. She completed her PhD on the role of the right hemisphere in language processing in 2010 with Hartwig Siebner at Kiel University. During her PhD, she started using multifocal TMS approaches to investigate interactions between key language areas. Gesa did a postdoc with Dorothee Saur and Joseph Classen at Leipzig University, performing multi-method research on language networks. In 2013, she was appointed as Junior Professor for Biological Psychology at Kiel University. She returned to Leipzig in 2015 to work as a research group leader at MPI-CBS in the Department of Neuropsychology with Angela Friederici. In 2019, she was appointed as independent Lise Meitner research group leader.

James Dowsett is a post doc in the department of Neurology at the LMU in Munich, in the working group of Paul Taylor in the German Centre for Vertigo and Balance Disorders. Prior to this position he completed his PhD at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg under the supervision of Christoph Herrmann.

His current research focuses on neural oscillations and multisensory integration, in particular visual-vestibular integration and its role in navigation and orientation in space.

His main research interest is devolving methods to probe and modulate neural oscillations. This includes combining TMS and tACS with EEG, using steady state evoked potentials (SSVEPs) to probe the oscillatory dynamics of the cortex, and combining these methods with mobile EEG to study neural oscillations during movement and in real world environments.  A continuing research project, which began during his PhD, focuses on optimising tACS by exploring the effect of different stimulation waveform shapes and developing artefact removal methods for online tACS-EEG. This research has the eventual goal of creating a system for rapid prototyping of tACS stimulation parameters to optimize/individualize stimulation.

Dr Jen Chesters is a cognitive neuroscientist and Speech and Language Therapist. She is interested in how brain stimulation and imaging techniques can be used to better support people with conditions affecting speech, language and communication.

Jen began investigating the effects of tDCS in adults developmental stuttering  in her doctoral research, supervised by Prof Kate Watkins and Dr Riikka Mottonen at the University of Oxford. She is continuing to work with people who stutter, as a post-doctoral researcher in Prof Kate Watkins’ team, using  a combination of tDCS, TMS, MRI and MEG approaches.