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.

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. Rainer Goebel is Full Professor for Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University where he trained and supervised more than 80 PhD students. He is the initiator of the Maastricht ultra-high field MRI center, and he is Co-PI of the 14 Tesla 'DYNAMIC' grant and member of its scientific board. He received funding for basic and translational neuroscience research including twice the prestigious Advanced Investigators Grant from the European Research Council (2011 – 2016 and 2024 - 2029) and several grants from the Human Brain Project (2014-2023). Since 2014 Rainer Goebel is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and since 2017 member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina). He is also founder and CEO of the company Brain Innovation B.V. (see brainvoyager.com). developing free and commercial software for neuroimaging data analysis, education, and clinical translation.

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.

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

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.

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).

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. In recent years, he has been involved in the development of domain research infrastructures, such as for digital humanities, as well as for personalized medicine. Cezary’s scientific activities mainly focus on applying machine learning methods for early detection of disease development mechanisms. A solution led by him to support pre-symptomatic diagnosis of glaucoma development using machine learning received patent protection from the Japan Patent Office in 2023 and from European Patent Office in 2025 . He is currently extending his interests to advanced methods of data collection and analysis in a digital twin model. He is author or co-author of over 100 papers in professional journals and conference proceedings. Since 2020 the President of Wielkopolska ICT Cluster. Since 2023 the member of GÉANT Association Board of Directors. In 2024 he initiated the establishment of a national consortium EBRAINS-PL and became the member of EBRAINS National Node Board. IEEE Senior Member, member of IEEE Computer Society as well as IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

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.