BOARDS

Emrah Düzel is neurologist and studies the functional anatomy of human episodic memory networks, their clinical and mechanistic alterations in aging and neurodegeneration, and their resources of plasticity. He leads the Institute for Cognitive Neurology and Dementia Research at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, the memory clinic of the university hospital, and is spokesperson for the Magdeburg site of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE, Helmholtz Association). He is also a part-time group leader at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, a fellow of the Max Planck School of Cognition, and co-founder of the digital health start-up neotiv. Within the newly founded German Network of Memory Clinics, he also coordinates a working group on digital health and telemedicine.

Anne Maass is Group leader at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and a guest professor at the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg. In her group, she uses multimodal neuroimaging to unravel the molecular underpinnings of normal and pathological cognitive aging in the human brain. Therefore, her group applies functional and structural MRI including ultra-high resolution imaging at 7 Tesla, and PET imaging including Tau PET. She is currently building up a deeply phenotyped aging and SuperAging cohort in Magdeburg as part of the CRC1436 that is characterized by multimodal imaging to identify which factors underly resilience and resistance against age-related pathology, such as tau accumulation, vascular pathology and neuroinflammation.

Sanaz Mostaghim is a professor of computer science at the chair of Computational Intelligence and the founder and head of SwarmLab at the Faculty of Computer Science. She holds a PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Paderborn, has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and as a lecturer at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where she received her habilitation degree in applied computer science. Her research interests are in the area of multi-criteria optimization and decision-making, evolutionary computation, collective learning and decision-making, and their applications in robotics and science. Sanaz Mostaghim is a member of Saxon Academy of Sciences, the vice president of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), IEEE CIS distinguished lecturer, deputy chair of German Informatics and member of several advisory boards. She is an associate editor of IEEE Transaction on Evolutionary Computation as well as member of the editorial board of several international journals on AI. She has been appointed as a member of advisory board at the Ministry of Infrastructure and Digitalization of Saxony-Anhalt.

Thomas Nickl-Jockschat studied human medicine at the University of Regensburg and worked as an assistant doctor at the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and the Neurological Clinic at RWTH Aachen. Following his doctorate and qualification as specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy, he was senior physician at the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Aachen and worked at the American University of Pennsylvania. In 2017 he was appointed associate professor of psychiatry and in 2021 to the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa, USA. In 2024 he took over the chair of psychiatry and psychotherapy at the University of Magdeburg and the management of the university clinic. His translational research focuses on identifying changes in neuronal networks and their molecular basis, e.g. in schizophrenia or autism spectrum disorders, and transferring the findings into practice.

Janelle Pakan leads the research group 'Neural Circuits & Network Dynamics'. She completed her PhD work in Canada at the University of Alberta and postdoc work at University of British Columbia before relocating to Europe to complete Fellowships in Ireland and at the University of Edinburgh. Her research group at the Leibniz-Institute is focused on understanding the functional neural circuits that underlie the transformation of sensory information to behavioural output in both health and disease states. She utilizes functional neuroanatomical techniques to trace neural circuits and advanced two-photon imaging in behaving mice in combination with virtual environments to probe interactions between sensory and motor systems that support cognition during active learning.