John Rothwell Award Winner 2021: Professor Til Ole Bergmann

We are delighted to confirm that Professor Dr Til Ole Bergmann of the TOBergmann Lab, LIR Mainz, has been awarded the inaugural John Rothwell Award for his outstanding contributions to non-invasive brain stimulation research throughout his career.

Professor Dr Til Ole Bergmann is a biological psychologist and cognitive neuroscience with a keen research interest in the function of neuronal oscillations in cognition. His research, in particular, focuses on the organisation of information processing and the gating of synaptic plasticity in the awake and sleeping human brain.

Til's methodological focus is on the simultaneous combination of non-invasive transcranial brain stimulation techniques with neuroimaging technologies and electrophysiology, as well as the development of novel approaches such as brain state-dependent brain stimulation.

Professor Til Ole Bergmann graduated with a degree in Psychology from the University of Kiel (Germany), before continuing to study his PhD under the guidance of Professor Hartwig Siebner. This project explored the oscillatory underpinnings of memory consolidation during sleep using concurrent tES-TMS, EEG-fMRI, and TMS-EEG.

He carried out his postdoctoral research alongside Professor Ole Jensen at the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Beavious in Nijmegen, studying the function of alpha oscillations for visuospatial attention using concurrent TMS-EEG and tES-MEG approaches. 

After moving across several other institutions throughout his career, Til established his own research group for neuromodulation techniques at the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR) in Mainz (Germany), where he established concurrent TMS-fMRI techniques and further advances EEG-triffered TMS and the automation of neurostimulation experiments. In November 2020, Til was appointing as Associate Professor of Neurostimulation at the Johannes Gutenberg University Medical Center in Mainz, which keeping an associated research group at the LIR to continue studying the neurobiological correlates of emotional memory processing for resilience.

The John Rothwell Award, launched in 2021, was established in order to recognise and reward some of the very best contributions being made in non-invasive brain stimulation research by mid-career neuroscientists around the world. The winner of the award, selected each year by Professor John Rothwell, is invited to join us at the Brainbox Initiative Conference to provide some fascinating insights into their ongoing work in the field.