Meet the Minds Shaping the EBRAINS Summit 2025

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.

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.

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.

Judith Kathrein is a project manager at the Medical University of Innsbruck, coordinating education and training activities within EBRAINS. She previously worked in the Human Brain Project’s Education Programme and has extensive experience in managing interdisciplinary neuroscience education programmes.

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).

Sandra Diaz Pier was born in Mexico City, has a Bachelor in Electronic systems engineering, a masters in computer science with specialization on quantum computing, a masters in electronics engineering and a PhD in computer science with focus on computational neuroscience. Since 2023 she is Scientific Leader of the Simulation and Data Lab Neuroscience at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. Her research focus is on high performance computing, simulation of brain dynamics and plasticity at different scales, and optimization. She is an active collaborator in the implementation of the infrastructure derived from the Human Brain Project, EBRAINS. She was also member of the High level support steering committee and active in the technical coordination and education programme of the project. She has participated in several EU projects including the Human Brain Project (HBP), Virtual Brain Cloud, eBRAIN-Health and Virtual Brain Twin. She has also contributed to open source codes like the NEST simulator (https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator), The Virtual Brain (https://github.com/the-virtual-brain), and L2L (https://github.com/Meta-optimization/L2L).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Onur Güntürkün is professor of behavioral neuroscience at Ruhr University Bochum.