Transforming Brain Research and Medicine

Emma is Director of Development at Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), a nonprofit working to strengthen adoption and investment in the open infrastructure that supports research and scholarship. She provides strategic coaching and advisory services to open infrastructure organizations on financial planning, business development, product-market fit, and organizational sustainability. She facilitates cross-sector dialogues to strengthen the ecosystem, convening publishers, tech companies, funders, and mission-driven organizations to find common ground and explore how different stakeholders can collaborate. Emma's background spans conservation genetics, marine biology and commercial organic farming, plus over 26 years in STM publishing at Nature Publishing Group, Delta Think, Hindawi, and Wiley. She is a competitive swimmer, often found in the pool and subsequently eating carbohydrates.

I hold a PhD in psychology and neuroscience, with a strong background in statistics and brain network modeling. My research began at the Rotman Research Institute at the University of Toronto, where I developed a deep interest in aging and cognition. Over the years, I’ve led international collaborations that resulted in The Virtual Brain (thevirtualbrain.org), a globally adopted platform for simulating large-scale brain dynamics using personalized data. I’ve joined Simon Fraser University in 2022, where I serve as Director of the Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology. My vision is to bridge neuroscience research with real-world impact by pursuing two key goals: (1) integrating personalized brain modeling into clinical decision-making, and (2) creating a cloud-based platform that makes these tools accessible for research, education, and clinical use. I’m particularly focused on building interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches to improve brain health across the lifespan.

Dr Wim Scheenen studied biology at Radboud University. He holds a PhD degree in Science with a specialisation in Comparative Endocrinology. During his scientific career as an Assistant Professor in Cellular Neurobiology (1997-2017), he revised the M.Sc. Medical Biology from his role as Education Coordinator of the education institute Bioscience, and later as its Director, he led the revision of the B.Sc. curriculum. Biology. As head of the Education Centre from 2017 to 2022, he was responsible for all educational support to the faculty of Science. During that period, he was one of the co-founders of the university-wide management team Education and Student Affairs (MESA). As head of the Education Centre, he participated in the Radboud Platform Internationalisation and several ad hoc platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since January 2023, he is the education project manager at Radboud University for NeurotechEU. He leads the work package on Interdisciplinary Knowledge Creation and is responsible for the education of NeurotechEU, as well as being involved in the interoperability challenges of the alliance.

Martin is a tenure-track assistant professor at EPFL where he aims to understand the brain in computational terms. To achieve this goal, he bridges research in Machine Learning, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science. He initiated the community-wide Brain-Score platform for evaluating models on their neural and behavioral alignment, and built state-of-the-art models such as CORnet, VOneNet, and TopoLM. Martin completed his PhD at MIT with Jim DiCarlo, following Bachelor's and Master's degrees in computer science at TUM, LMU, and UNA. Previously he worked at Harvard, MetaMind/Salesforce, Oracle, and co-founded two startups. Martin is actively advancing NeuroAI into translational technologies as a scientific advisor to startups. Among others, his work has been recognized in the news at Science magazine, BBC, Quanta, and Scientific American; and with awards such as the Neuro-Irv and Helga Cooper Open Science Prize, the Google.org Impact Challenge prize, and the Takeda fellowship in AI + Health.

Shubo Chakrabarti is a systems neuroscientist by training. He earned his Master’s at King’s College London and PhD at Penn State University, then held an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the German Primate Center before becoming a Principal Investigator at the University Hospital Tübingen, where he studied state estimation in sensorimotor circuits. In 2020, he transitioned to industry and joined MathWorks, where he drives MATLAB adoption across European and African research infrastructures and leads a team supporting major research institutions in Central Europe.

Dr. Pernet is a senior scientist with interested in open science (data sharing with OpenNeuroPET; data standards with BIDS; best practices with the OHBM COBIDAS; practical ethics with the Open Brain Consent), and neuroimaging methods (preprocessing pipelines, QC, statistics) for clinical applications (brain tumours, dementia). Dr Pernet obtained a PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology from the University of Toulouse III in France in 2004. He was then working with Prof. JF Demonet and Dr P Celsis on neurodevelopmental disorders using MRI, functional MRI and EEG. He next obtained a post-doc fellowship from the Fyssen Foundation to work in Finland with Prof. R. Salmelin on reading using MEG. He moved to the UK in 2006, working in Glasgow with Prof. B. Belin as post-doc research assistant, working on auditory (voice) processing using fMRI and EEG. He joined the Brain Research Imaging Center, Edinburgh in 2007, as fMRI lead for SINAPSE (Scottish Imaging Network A Platform for Scientific Excellence) and became Senior Research Fellow & functional imaging scientific leader for Edinburgh Imaging in 2015. In 2021, he joined the Neurobiology Research Unit in Copenhagen, coordinating the development of OpenNeuroPET.

The main focus of Jeanette Hällgren Kotaleski’s research is the use of modeling and simulations to understand the neural mechanisms underlying information processing and learning in the brain. The research spans multiple biological scales, from large-scale simulations of cellular-level neural networks down to kinetic models—systems biology approaches—of molecular and cellular processes. Interdisciplinary collaborations with experimental laboratories, both nationally and internationally, have been and continue to be essential to this work.

Jean-Baptiste (JB) Poline, PhD, is a tenured Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, and at the School of Computer Science at McGill; the director of the ORIGAMI (https://neurodatascience.github.io/) neuro-data-science laboratory where the Neurobagel (https://neurobagel.org) and Nipoppy (https://nipoppy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) projects are developed. He is a strong proponent of open and reproducible science, founded or co-founded two scientific journals, works with several groups on training (ReproNim, Neurohackademy, etc) or standardization (GA4GH, INCF) initiatives, chaired the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility scientific council, Chaired the NeuroHub and Technical Steering Committee for the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform at the Neuro. Among the early pioneers of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), today, Prof. Jean-Baptiste Poline is a leading researcher in the fields of neuroimaging, imaging genetics, data science and neuroinformatics technologies and works with several initiative worldwide to develop open, reproducible, and efficient neuroimaging research.

Maryann Martone is professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego and maintains an active laboratory, the FAIR Data Informatics Lab. She started her career as a neuroanatomist, specializing in light and electron microscopy, but her main research for the past 20 years focused on informatics for neuroscience, i.e., neuroinformatics. She led the Neuroscience Information Framework, a national project to establish a uniform resource description framework for neuroscience, and the NIDDK Information Network (dkNET), a portal for connecting researchers in digestive, kidney and metabolic disease to data, tools and materials.

After her PhD in mathematics, Rachel Brouwer worked at the department of Psychiatry, University Medical Center Utrecht where she studied the brain development and brain changes in disease, using genetically informative longitudinal brain imaging data. She is co-lead of the ENIGMA plasticity working group, an international collaboration to study the genetic architecture of longitudinal changes of brain structural measures. Currently she works as a researcher at the department of Complex Trait Genetics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Renqing Cuomao is a master’s student in Computer Science at EPFL, focusing on multilingual data quality enhancement for large-scale language model pretraining. As a Google Summer of Code contributor with INCF and EBRAINS, she is developing BIDS2EBRAINS, a modular tool that automates the registration of BIDS-compliant neuroimaging datasets into the EBRAINS Knowledge Graph, advancing metadata standardization and FAIR data integration in neuroscience. Originally from Tibet, she is passionate about equitable AI, with a focus on metadata curation and language technologies for low-resource communities.

Valentina Emiliani is CNRS Research Director at the Vision Institute in Paris, where she leads the Photonics Department and the Wave Front Engineering Microscopy group. She pioneered wave front shaping for all-optical brain manipulation, introducing spatiotemporal methods such as computer-generated holography, generalized phase contrast, and temporal focusing. Her group combined these approaches with optogenetics to control hundreds of neurons with cellular resolution and millisecond precision. They further developed holographic endoscopy for simultaneous photostimulation and imaging in freely moving animals and extended these methods to two-photon voltage imaging. Her current research advances optical technologies to probe functional connectivity and signal processing in mouse and non-human primate visual pathways, while also developing strategies for vision restoration in humans. She has received multiple Brain Initiative research grants and an ERC Advanced Grant (2021).

Francis studied cognitive science and AI throughout his academic career, completing his doctoral work in computational modelling of neural information coding. With software and data engineering experience in academia and the industry, he supported the Ontario Brain Institute's effort to launch their Brain-CODE neuroscience research data platform in 2013. Francis has co-founded startups and continues to engage and support early-stage companies and research labs in their efforts to have a real-world impact. He's led data science initiatives in the clinical research setting including neuroscience, cardiovascular, and chronic pain. Today, Francis heads the newly formed Centre for Analytics at the Ontario Brain Institute to help advance skills, technologies, and translation of neuroanalytics into care. Over the past decade, he's engaged and published with collaborators on numerous projects building tools for data sharing and analysis via the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), the International Rare Disease Research Consortium, the INCF, and others. He continues to pursue analytics research in areas such as health risk modelling, predictive systems, and federated learning.

Mathew Birdsall Abrams, PhD, MPH is Director of Science and Training at the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), a global organization dedicated to open, FAIR, and citable neuroscience. Mathew is a neuroscientist with over 25 years of experience in both experimental neuroscience and clinical psychiatry, as well as 12 years of experience in community coordination, community building, and product development in neuroinformatics. Mathew has worked with the infrastructure developers of the world’s large scale brain initiatives (BRAIN Initiative in US, Human Brain Project in Europe, Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform, and Brain/MINDS in Japan). He also holds Positions of Trust in many neuroscience societies (e.g. SfN, FUN, FENS, and IBRO). Mathew conducted his doctoral thesis research at Tulane University and Karolinska Institutet, obtained his MPH in Health Systems Management at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and completed his undergraduate education at the University of Richmond.

Ritter heads the Brain Simulation Section at the Charité University Medicine Berlin and Berlin Institute of Health (BIH). She serves as the Director for International Affairs at the Charité. Prof. Ritter leads / has led large EU infrastructure projects such as the Testing and Experimentation Facility Health AI and Robotics (TEF-Health, tefhealth.eu), European Open Science Cloud’s Virtual Brain Cloud (project ended) and eBRAIN-Health where she directs the development of compliant health data processing environments supporting the European Health Data Space. Prof. Petra Ritter is leading the Health Data Cloud of EBRAINS. She has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant acknowledging the scientific and technological excellence of her work.

Johannes Schemmel has been the head of the “Electronic Visions” research group at the Kirchhoff-Institute für Physik since 2000 and of the ASIC Laboratory at Heidelberg University since 2008. He currently holds the chair in “Neuromorphic Computing Architectures” at the Institute of Computer Engineering (ziti) at Heidelberg University. His research focuses on highly parallel mixed-signal circuits for information processing, specifically the analog implementation of biologically inspired neural networks. His research group pioneered the wafer-scale implementation of analog neuromorphic processors and currently operates the Heidelberg neuromorphic BrainScaleS system as part of the European EBRAINS research infrastructure.

Pieter R. Roelfsema received his MD in 1991 and his PhD in 1995. Since 2002 he has worked at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, where he served as director from 2007 to 2023. He is Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at the Department of Neurosurgery of the Amsterdam University Medical Center, and is affiliated with the Institut de la Vision in Paris. He has been awarded a NWO-VICI grant (2008) and two ERC Advanced Grants (2014, 2022). His research focuses on visual perception, plasticity, memory, and consciousness, studied in experimental animals, humans, and neural networks. He investigates how neurons across brain areas cooperate during seeing and thinking, and how networks reconfigure themselves during learning. Roelfsema also develops neurotechnologies for visual prostheses, aiming to restore rudimentary sight in blind individuals. He coordinates the Dutch neurotechnology initiative NeuroTech-NL and in 2019 co-founded Phosphoenix, a start-up developing visual brain prostheses.

Having worked in several fields that are marked by emergent phenomena arising from complex interactions, from high-multiplicity particle collisions to ultracold glasses and, ultimately, biological and artificial neuronal systems, it is this science of complexity that continues to intrigue and inspire me. Following my Diploma studies and PhD at the University of Heidelberg, I moved to the University of Bern, where I am now leading the Neuro-inspired Theory, Modeling and Applications (NeuroTMA) Lab. I believe there is much to learn from brains about cognition, but taking steps beyond biology may well be warranted when building physical substrates for artificial intelligence – there are good reasons for airplanes not to flap their wings. Therefore, in our group, we combine knowledge and methods from a variety of fields - neuroscience, mathematics, physics, machine learning and microelectronics - to understand biological intelligence and extract its key features for subsequent implementation in silico.

Dr. Cezary Mazurek, Computer Scientist, his professional activity has been associated with the development of the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PCSS) since its establishment in 1993. He served as CEO of PCSS from 2019 to 2024 and at that time he successfully brought it onto the path of developing infrastructure and applications of quantum computing and AI, and is now continuing this thread with a focus on applications in Life Sciences and Personalized Medicine. For over 30 years, he has been involved in the development of Polish and European e-infrastructure for science and is currently one of the most experienced leaders in R&D projects, many of which he has successfully implemented in practice. To date, he has led development of more than 40 national and international R&D projects. His R&D work has focused on integrating various specialized software components into consistent systems for digital science with emphasis on software governance.

Estela Suarez is joint lead of the department "Novel System Architecture Design" at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and Associate Professor for High Performance Computing at the University of Bonn. Her expertise is in HPC system architecture and codesign. As leader of the DEEP project series, she has driven the development of the Modular Supercomputing Architecture, including the implementation and validation of hardware, software and applications. In addition, she has been leading the codesign efforts within the European Processor Initiative from 2018 until 2024. Between 2024 and 2025 she took a sabbatical to fill the position of Senior Principal Solution Architect at SiPEARL. She holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and a Master's degree in Astrophysics from the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain).

I’m a Turkish-born Professor for Biopsychology at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany and I’m kept awake with questions like: “Can different kinds of brains produce the same cognition?” or “Why are brains asymmetrically organized?”. I spent many years in different universities and science institutions on five continents and work (in descending order) with pigeons, humans, dolphins, corvids, and crocodiles as experimental subjects. I would call myself a Cognitive and Comparative Neuroscientist who works with research approaches that reach from field work via single cell recordings, behavioral experiments and neuroanatomy up to brain imaging at ultrahigh magnetic fields. I’m an elected member of several scientific academies, among them the German National Academy of Sciences and received numerous national and international scientific awards, among them the highest German (Leibniz) and Turkish science award (TÜBITAK special award) as well the European ERC Advanced Grant.

Cathrin Stöver has belonged to the GÉANT team since 1997, holding various positions as the organisation has grown and developed, always with a specific focus on growing the geographic reach of the GÉANT network and the deepening of the global R&E collaboration for the benefit of the global research and education community. Today, Cathrin carries the overall responsibility for the Marketing Communications and Design teams and additionally the EU Liaison Team as Chief Communications Officer. Cathrin has been a member of the EOSC Executive Board from 2019 to 2021 and of the SIAB of HBP from 2020 to 2024. She is a member of the Scientific Council of the German research data-infrastructure, NFDI.

Katrin Amunts is a German neuroscientist. With her team, she has developed a unique 3D Human Brain Atlas - a kind of Google Maps for the brain. By bridging the macro and micro worlds, it helps scientists gain new insights into brain organization and to inform brain medicine. Prof. Amunts has played a key role in promoting European and global collaboration. From 2016 until its completion in 2023, she was Scientific Director of the EU flagship ""Human Brain Project"", in which 122 institutions worked together. It gave rise to the EBRAINS research infrastructure, which the neuroscientist now heads as Joint CEO.

Maja Puchades received her PhD in Neurochemistry at the Gothenburg University, Sweden in 2003, on developing proteomic methods for studying biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease. After several post-doc periods working with different neurodegenerative disease models, she joined the Neural Systems Laboratory at the University of Oslo in 2015. The main research focus is development of software tools for analyses of rodent data in context of 3D reference atlases. In the Human brain project (HBP) and EBRAINS infrastructure, she acted as deputy leader for the Brain atlas service and related tools and participated to the EBRAINS Curation team. Newly appointed as work package manager in the EBRAINS 2.0 project, she works in the Services for FAIR neuroscience data and data processing.

Viktor Jirsa is Chief Science Officer at the EBRAINS AISBL. He studied Theoretical Physics and Philosophy in Stuttgart, Germany, and is Director of Research at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Director of the Inserm Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes (INS) at Aix-Marseille University. Since the late 90s, Viktor Jirsa has made pioneering contributions to the understanding of how network structure constrains the emergence of functional dynamics using methods from nonlinear dynamic system theory and computational neuroscience. His work laid the theoretical basis for connectome-based brain modeling. During the Human Brain Project, he led the efforts in personalized brain modeling in epilepsy, ultimately contributing to the digital twin use in brain medicine. He has significant experience in coordinating national and international research consortia and organisations. Since 2005, he has been the leader of the brain simulation platform The Virtual Brain; during 2019-2024 he was scientific coordinator of the clinical trial EPINOV in epilepsy surgery; and since 2024 he coordinates the large European project Virtual Brain Twin to improve medication outcome in schizophrenia.

Since July 2023, Philippe Vernier has served as Joint CEO of EBRAINS. He is an Emeritus Research Director of Exceptional Class at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Scientific Advisor at CEA Paris-Saclay. He is a specialist in brain development and its evolution. His research focuses on the evolution of the brain and neuromodulatory neurotransmission systems, as well as the evolution of cognitive functions such as language, memory, and emotions. His work also addresses neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Philippe Vernier previously led the Frédéric Joliot Institute for Life Sciences at the CEA Saclay Center (2019-2024). Prior to that, he was the director of the Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience (NeuroPSI), which he founded (2015–2019). A former neurology resident at hospitals of Grenoble, Philippe Vernier was trained in neuroscience and molecular biology at Claude Bernard University (Lyon) and Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris).

Johannes Passecker is a tenure-track Assistant Professor for Systems Neuroscience at the Medical University Innsbruck, Austria and Co-founder of TiliaHealth. He is General Secretary of the Austrian Neuroscience Association, active in a number of committees to advance neuroscience education and teaches himself at the crossroads of neuroscience and Digital Medicine

Prof. Jan Bjaalie is Chief Data and Knowledge Officer at the EBRAINS AISBL and leader of the Data Services of the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure. Since 2023, he is Dean of Research and Innovation at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo. He is a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at the Institute of Basic Medical Science and Head of the Norwegian Neuroinformatics Node. His previous roles include Head of the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Oslo (2009-2016), founding Executive Director of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) at Karolinska Institute (2006-2008), Chair of the INCF Governing Board (2013-2016), and Co-Chair of the International Brain Initiative (2019-2020). Within the EU flagship Human Brain Project, he was the Neuroinformatics Platform Leader (2017–2020) and Infrastructure Director (2018–2022). His research group has focused on sensory map transformations, wiring patterns in the brain, and developing data systems for organising and managing neuroscience research data using next-generation digital brain atlases. Jan Bjaalie is the Chief Editor of Frontiers in Neuroinformatics and former Section Editor for Brain Structure and Function.

Rainer Goebel is a German psychologist and neuroscientist, whose aim is a deeper understanding of how neuronal activity distributed in the brain leads to unified conscious precepts and mental images in our mind. He also develops innovative fMRI neurofeedback brain-computer interfaces where participants learn to regulate their own brain activity in emotion-specific brain regions with beneficial results for several psychiatric and neurological disorders To identify the basis of mental processes, he primarily uses high‐resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and brain-inspired neural network modelling.

Masud Husain is Professor of Neurology & Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of Brain. Masud studied Medicine at Oxford and was a Harkness postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. He subsequently held positions at Imperial College London and became Professor of Neurology at the Institute of Neurology, UCL and the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery London, and Deputy Director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL. He moved to Oxford in 2012, where he leads a research group which studies motivation, decision-making and memory in healthy people and patients with brain disorders.

Rafael Yuste, M.D., Ph.D, is a neuroscientist that studies the cerebral cortex at Columbia University. Yuste pioneered the development of many imaging techniques and led the researchers who proposed the US BRAIN Initiative and the “Morningside” group proposal of novel human rights (“Neurorights”) to protect brain activity and brain data. He recently spearheaded the launching of Spain Neurotech, a Spanish Brain Initiative.

Professor Frank Winkler is a managing senior physician in the Department of Neurology at the University of Heidelberg and group leader at the German Cancer Research Center. He studied medicine in Hamburg, Freiburg and London, specialized in Neurology at the LMU Munich, spent a 2 year postdoc at Harvard, and was appointed to Heidelberg in 2010. Dr Winklers’ work has been published in Nature, Cell, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell. In 2022 he received the German Cancer Award, in 2024 the BIAL award for Biomedicine and in 2025 the Brain Prize, the world’s largest prize for Neuroscience and Neuromedicine. His work focusses on the interaction of the nervous system with cancer, pioneering the field of Cancer Neuroscience, and launching investigator-initiated trial concepts.