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Christian Apfelbacher is Professor of Epidemiology and Health Systems Research at the University of Magdeburg and Director of the Institute of Social Medicine and Health Systems Research. He also has a role as Visiting Professor of Health Services Research at Family Medicine & Primary Care, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, NTU Singapore. His research interests are centred around the (clinical) epidemiology of both chronic and acute illness, health-related quality of life, core outcome sets (COS) for research and practice, health literacy, evidence synthesis, evaluation of complex interventions as well as involvement and engagement of patients and the public in research.

Dr. David Berron is a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist and heads the Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE). His research aims to develop disease-stage specific imaging and cognitive markers to monitor cognitive and brain decline. To that end, he aims to understand the functional architecture of cognitive functions with a special focus on human memory and the medial temporal lobe and the effects of disease pathology on these functional brain systems using structural and functional MRI at 3 and 7 Tesla in combination with Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers. He develops and investigates remote and unsupervised digital assessments via smartphones and tablets in combination with novel biomarkers for future health care and clinical trial applications.

Christiane is a cellular immunologist. She obtained her PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University Hospital Erlangen, Germany and the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford, UK. Her main research focus is on how activation of innate immune cells by microbial signals shapes adaptive immune responses and how dysbalances in these complex signalling networks contributes to neuroinflammation. Within the recovery promotion workspace, Christiane will be investigating the impact of systemic and local immune responses on the onset and persistence of cognitive fatigue.

Dr. Alexander Dityatev is a full Professor at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg and the Head of “Molecular Neuroplasticity” Research Group at DZNE Magdeburg. His group is studying the role of neural extracellular matrix in neuroplasticity and cognitive functions and the underlying molecular mechanisms. These studies are complemented by a search for new ECM-targeting treatments in aging and mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, epilepsy, and other neurological conditions. Moreover, the group is developing new two-photon imaging assays to directly study the role of ECM in the regulation of microglia-synapse interaction and neural network activity.

Alexander is a neuroimmunologist. He obtained his M.Sc. from the Ruhr-University Bochum and is currently a senior PhD student. His main interest is decoding the crosstalk of the gut-brain axis and its role in neuroinflammation and neuroregeneration. He could recently show that supplementation with short-chain fatty acids improves disease course in 300 patients with multiple sclerosis. Within the recovery promotion workspace, Alexander will be investigating novel translational intervention strategies to target cognitive fatigue.

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.

Prof. Dr. Christian Hansen is currently Professor for Virtual and Augmented Reality at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. His expertise lies at the intersection of computer science and medicine. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Jacobs University Bremen, Germany, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on improving medical procedures through advanced visualization and human-computer interaction technologies.

Mechanical engineer Erik Harnau works as a research assistant at the Chair of Production Systems and Automation at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. In the field of ergonomics, he focuses on the design and use of physical and cognitive assistance technologies. For his doctoral project, he is particularly investigating the potential applications of digital motion capture systems in an industrial context. While physical stress factors and their effects on the human organism can largely be measured and evaluated objectively, cognitive stress can often only be quantified through subjective perceptions. For this reason, as part of the "Cognitive Vitality" initiative, he would like to contribute to opening up new possibilities for the objective assessment of both cognitive stress in the workplace and the effectiveness of cognitive assistance systems.

Hongbo Jia studied physics as an undergrad at Peking University and switched to neuroscience during his M.Sc. study at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He then completed a Ph.D. in neuroscience under the supervision of Prof. Arthur Konnerth and Prof. Bert Sakmann at the Technical University Munich in 2011. He leads the microscopy section of the Combinatorial NeuroImaging (CNI) core facility of the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology (LIN), offering a broad spectrum of microscopy services with specific expertise in two-photon imaging that supports multiple groups and projects in this initiative. In parallel, he also leads a small research group dedicated to studying specific single-cell candidates of long-term memory storage in the neocortex by using in-vivo microscopy techniques.

As Heisenberg-Professor, Kristine Krug heads the Department of Sensory Physiology in the Institute of Biology at the OVGU and is an external scientific member at the Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology. She leads a research programme investigating the neural signals and codes underlying perception and decision-making in humans and monkeys. Her internationally recognized expertise lies in manipulating primate neural circuits directly to change neural function from single neurons to cognitive behaviour. Her research combines in vivo electrophysiology, eletcrical microstimulation, optogenetics, ultrasound, MR imaging at high field, psychophysics and histology to delineate the activity patterns in interconnected brain circuits that give rise to our perceptual experience. Kristine Krug is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (UK), Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Primate Centre, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.

Felix Kuhn obtained a bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Würzburg and a master’s degree in Integrative Neuroscience from the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. After that he joined the department of Cellular Neuroscience of the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology for his PhD project. His research interest lies in understanding circuit mechanisms of spatial learning and their impairment in cognitive diseases using computational tools.

Dr. Maria Kühne is a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Zaehle's research group at the Department of Neurology. During her PhD, she investigated the influence of facial feedback on the processing of emotional faces and studied the effects of facial feedback manipulation in both healthy subjects and patients with Parkinson's disease. She is currently investigating potential therapeutic applications of NIBS technologies and is particularly interested in ways to individualize NIBS-based co-therapy approaches.

Resident in Neurology at University Clinic Magdeburg. Interested in research in autoimmune, neuromuscular and paraneoplastic disorders. Presently engaged in a scientific project, recruting patients with Parkinson´s Disease, who present with fatigue-symptoms.

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.

Lisa is a medical student at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and is currently doing her doctorate at the Department of Neurology. As part of a prospective pilot study, she is carrying out EEG measurements on test subjects with and without fatigue. The aim is to use this objective measurement method to identify correlations between EEG parameters and the clinical manifestation of different fatigue-associated diseases.

Robert Pohl is researcher and teaching coordinator at the Institute for Social Medicine and Health Systems Research at the University of Magdeburg. He is working on his doctorate in the field of occupational medicine. In recent years, in addition to his teaching activities, he has also been actively involved in preparation and analysis of population-based epidemiological studies. His research interests also include the involvement of patients and the public in order to integrate their perspectives and needs into scientific work.

Clara is a researcher in machine learning with a particular focus on using multi-layer networks for subgroup discovery. She works mainly with medical data and is currently developing a model that detects predictive subgroups cost-awarely. Her main goal is to provide medical researchers with valuable insights about their data and enable the design of tailored treatments for individuals who require them. She takes special care in showing these insights for them to be interpretable. Therefore, she develops interpretable visualizations of great relevance for the results to be interpretable.

Stefan Remy is the Scientific Director of the LIN, heads the Department of Cellular Neuroscience and is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at the Medical Faculty of Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. He received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 2003 and subsequently carried out postdoctoral research with Heinz Beck at the Department of Epileptology. As an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, he joined the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology at Northwestern University in Evanston, USA. There he conducted research with Nelson Spruston on synaptic plasticity and neuronal excitability. In 2007, he continued his research with Heinz Beck in Bonn, where he founded his own research group in 2009, funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Before taking up his new position at the LIN in 2020, he spent 10 years as head of the “Neuronal Networks” working group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn. Stefan Remy is spokesperson for the Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences (CBBS) and represents the Magdeburg site (in the Jena-Magdeburg-Halle network) at the newly founded German Center for Mental Health.

Margit Rudolf studied human medicine at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. As part of her specialist training, she worked in other clinics and has been working at the University Clinic for Orthopaedics in Magdeburg since 1997. She specialized in sports medicine and completed additional training in neural therapy, manual therapy and orthopaedic rheumatology. She is head of the outpatient clinic at the Orthopaedic University Clinic since 2007 and is active in research and teaching.

Dr. Vladislava Segen is a post-doctoral researcher at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), where she has made significant contributions to the field of aging, Alzheimer's disease and cognition. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from Bournemouth University, focusing on spatial navigation in aging. Currently, she is involved in several innovative projects including investigating the impact training vestibular function to prevent cognitive decline as well as investigating the mechanism that underpin spatial navigation across the aging spectrum from AD to Superaging.

Qihao Shan is a doctoral student and research assistant in the Chair of Computational Intelligence, Faculty of Computer Science, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. He obtained his master's degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 2019. His research focuses on multi-option collective decision making in swarm intelligence. He currently works for the EXC Initiative Cognitive Vitality on multi-objective analysis of medical and behavioral data.

Myra Spilliopoulou is Professor of Business Information Systems at the Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany. Her main research is on mining temporal complex data and extracting predictive patterns from evolving objects. One of the core application areas for her research, and a constant source of inspiration is health: her work encompasses methods and findings from observational medical data, from clinical studies, from digital health solutions, and from experiments on understanding the process of human and animal learning. She is involved as (senior) reviewer in major conferences on data mining and knowledge discovery, as Action Editor in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal of Springer Nature, as Special Editor for survey papers in the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics (JDSA) and as Editorial Board Member for the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Journal. In 2016, 2019 and 2023, she served as a PC Chair of the IEEE Int. Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS). In 2023, she serves as senior reviewer for KDD 2023 and ECML PKDD 2023. In 2024, she will serve as one of the Journal Track Chairs for ECML PKDD 2024. In May 2023, she received the Distinguished Service Contributions Award for the Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD).

Markus Ullsperger is Professor of Neuropsychology at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Trained as a medical doctor he has focused his career on cognitive neurosciences. He is an internationally leading expert in performance monitoring and cognitive control of humans. Using a convergent-methods approach combining neuroimaging, electroencephalography, psychopharmacological challenges, and brain stimulation in healthy participants and patients with neurological and mental disorders with computational modeling he aims at developing and testing neurobiologically plausible models of flexible, goal-directed behavior in humans. As a PI in the workshop Resource Mobilisation in CoVitality he will contribute to studying mechanisms of recruiting effort and cognitive control in a comparative cross-species approach.

Judith is a neuropsychologist with a profound interest in cognitive and behavioral deficits linked to neurodegeneration, bodily diseases, and aging. Her main research focus lies on the investigation of the neural correlates that underlie these challenges. As the scientific coordinator of the Mittel-Elbe platform in “Cognitive Vitality”, she works closely with projects in the Werkstätten, demonstrating her commitment to fostering collaboration and advancing research. Judith´s focus extends beyond conventional limits in the exploration of cognitive vitality, with a determined aim to contribute meaningful insights that push the boundaries of our understanding in this dynamic field.

Thomas Wolbers is the head of the Aging, Cognition & Technology group at the DZNE Magdeburg. By exploiting the unique potential of extended reality (XR) technologies, he has established an ambitious research program that (i) employs spatial navigation as a model system for understanding mechanisms of healthy and pathological ageing, (ii) develops XR based diagnostic tools to improve the assessment of cognitive health, and (iii) implements technology-based interventions to counteract emotional and cognitive deficits. In addition, he entertains international cooperations to broaden his research portfolio with computational modelling, software engineering and research on animal models of aging.

Ruojing Zhou is a post-doctoral researcher at the Aging, Cognition and Technology lab led by Prof. Thomas Wolbers at the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE). Under the Cognitive Vitality initiative, Ruojing and her colleagues aim to develop a novel therapeutic system based on extended-reality (XR) technology for vestibular rehabilitation/training in older adults. In addition to exploring the therapeutic potential of XR for healthy aging, Ruojing is also interested in understanding the neural/cognitive mechanisms of spatial cognition and the impact of aging on our navigation system.