Jianfeng Feng

Dean & Distinguished Professor, Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University.

Dean, School of Data Science, Fudan University.

Biography:  Jianfeng Feng is the chair professor of Shanghai National Centre for Mathematic Sciences, the Dean of Brain-inspired AI Institute in Fudan University, and the dean of the School of Data Science.

He has made considerable contributions on developing brain-inspired AI algorithms and applying them to tackle challenges raised in neuroscience and mental health with many publications in Nature Medicine, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Aging, Nature Mental Health etc.

He led a team to implement for the first time in the world the digital twin brain which has 86B neurons and 100T parameters. He was awarded the 2023 Humboldt Research Award, prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and invited to deliver 2019 Paykel Lecture at the Cambridge University. 

Pedro A. Valdes Sosa

Distinguished Professor of Neuroinformatics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. 

Biography:  Pedro Antonio Valdes-Sosa, a prominent Cuban neuroscientist, has significantly contributed to the field of neuroscience through his co-founding of the Cuban Neuroscience Center in 1990 and his pioneering work in neuroinformatics. His academic pursuits began with a medical degree from the University of Havana, followed by intensive studies in mathematics and biophysical modeling.

Valdes-Sosa's research has extensively covered statistical analysis of electrophysiological measurements and advanced neuroimaging techniques like fMRI, EEG, and MEG tomography. He has developed innovative nonlinear dynamical models of brain functions that have furthered understanding of brain dynamics and disorders.

His global impact is bolstered by his role as a distinguished professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, where he continues to lead cutting-edge research in neuroinformatics.

Throughout his illustrious career, Valdes-Sosa has received numerous accolades for his contributions to neuroscience and has played a vital role in fostering international collaborations, enhancing the global reach and effectiveness of neuroscientific research. 

Xiaoping Hu

Professor and Chair of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside.

Biography: Xiaoping Hu, currently the Professor and Chair of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside, is renowned for his advancements in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and neuroimaging.

With a Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the University of Chicago obtained in 1988, Hu's career spans several decades during which he has significantly influenced medical imaging technology, especially in functional MRI (fMRI). His research focuses on developing MRI-based techniques for early diagnosis and biomarker identification for neurological disorders, notably Parkinson's disease.

Recognized as a fellow by several prestigious organizations including the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and IEEE, Hu's work not only enriches the scientific community but also leads innovations in biomedical engineering. 

Hanchuan Peng

Director of the SEU-ALLEN Joint Center.

Biography:  Hanchuan Peng is the director of the SEU-ALLEN Joint Center. His lab develops revolutionary technologies to generate, manage, visualize, analyze and understand massive-scale structure and function data related to brains. Peng also led the Big Image Mining team at Janelia, HHMI.

Peng is a highly cited inventor of a number of new algorithms and software/hardware systems, including Vaa3D - a widely adopted high-performance platform for very large multi-dimensional images, BrainAligner, SmartScope, mRMR, etc.

He built and co-worked the first digital maps for several widely used model systems at single cell/neurite resolution, and led the “BigNeuron” initiative.

Peng was inducted into AIMBE in 2019, is a co-recipient of USA National Academy of Sciences’ Cozzarelli Prize (2013), and a recipient of the DIADEM award (2010). His work has been featured in Nature, Science, NPR, and NBC, among others. 

Benjamin Becker

Professor at the University of Hong Kong, Department of Psychology.

Biography:  Benjamin Becker, currently Professor at The University of Hong Kong and Adjunct Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, leads research teams that aim at determining and modulating affective and motivational processes in healthy individuals and patients with mental disorders using advanced brain imaging in combination with neural decoding and neuropeptide and neurotechnology based interventions.

Becker's contributions to the field are documented through over 250 publications in respected journals reflecting his impact on cognitive and translational neuroscience.

He is active editorial board member of several journals, including Psychotherapy & Psychosomatics and Psychopharmacology, and director of the Cognitive Science Program at The University of Hong Kong.

Petra Ritter

Professor of Brain Simulation, Charité University Medicine Berlin and Berlin Institute of Health.

Biography:  Petra Ritter is a German neuroscientist and medical doctor at Charité in Berlin. Her field is computational neuroscience and her focus is developing brain simulations for individual people with neurological conditions, combining EEG and neuroimaging data. Ritter studied medicine at Humboldt University Berlin.

She did residencies at UCLA, UCSD, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and Harvard Medical School, as well as Charité. In 2002, she received her medical license to practice medicine. In 2004, she completed her doctoral thesis at Charité under Arno Villringer.

She led a lab at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig from 2011 to 2015. She is a co-founder of The Virtual Brain open-source brain simulation platform. Since October 2017 she has held a lifetime BIH Johanna-Quandt Full Professorship of Brain Simulation at the Dept. of Neurology at the Charité and Berlin Institute of Health.

Jie Zhang

Professor at the Institute of Brain-Inspired Intelligence Science and Technology, Fudan University.

Biography:  Jie Zhang is a researcher and doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Brain-Inspired Intelligence Science and Technology, Fudan University. His research primarily uses complex networks, time series analysis, pattern recognition, and deep learning to study the mechanisms of dynamic information processing in the brain, human intelligence, and mental illnesses.

He received his PhD from Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2008. Zhang has been nominated for the "Hong Kong Young Scientist Award" and is an honorary member of the "System Modeling Analysis and Prediction" laboratory at Oxford University. As the first or corresponding author, he has published over 90 SCI papers in prestigious journals such as Brain, Plos. Biology, Molecular Psychiatry, and American Journal of Psychiatry, with more than 5000 citations on Google Scholar. Notably, his 2016 paper in Brain, which was a cover article, was commented on by MacArthur Fellow Professor Bassett as "a cornerstone in our understanding of brain dynamics."

He leads several National Natural Science Foundation projects and a major 2030 Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Research project on "Cognitive Function Modeling Based on Brain Atlases."

Yong He

Distinguished Professor of the Beijing Normal University.

Biography:  Dr. Yong He is a Changjiang Distinguished Professor of the Beijing Normal University. He is currently the Founding Director of the Beijing Key Laboratory of Brain Imaging and Connectomics, the Deputy Director of the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, and the Principal Investigator of IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

He did his PhD at the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2002-2005) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Canada (2005-2007). Dr. He received numerous national award including the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Innovative Research Groups, 2021) and National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (2012).

Currently, he serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Brain Research. To date, Dr. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, with a total citation of 50,000 and an H-index of 104. From 2016 to 2023, Dr. He was selected as Highly Cited Researchers in Neuroscience & Behavior (Clarivate Analytics).

Dr He’s research interest mainly focuses on imaging connectomics. Specifically, his team has developed a variety of methodologies to describe connectome architectures of structural and functional brain networks, and further investigated network maturation in normal development and alterations in brain disorders. Dr He’s team has established graph-theoretical network analysis and visualization platforms for imaging connectomics (e.g., GRETNA and BrainNet Viewer). For details, see http://helab.bnu.edu.cn.

Pulin Gong

Associate Professor at the School of Physics, University of Sydney.

Biography:  Dr. Pulin Gong is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, where he leads the Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Group.

He also serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Computational Neuroscience. Before his tenure at the University of Sydney, Dr. Gong was a staff scientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. Dr. Gong's research focuses on investigating the self-organizing mechanisms of brain spatiotemporal dynamics and uncovering the underlying principles that govern how these dynamics implement neural computations.

Joana Cabral

Assistant Researcher at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), University of Minho.

Biography:  Joana Ribeiro Barbosa Cabral is a Biomedical Engineer with a PhD in Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience. She is focused on the fundamental principles of brain function, particularly the biophysical mechanisms that initiate coordinated brain activity. Joana's work explores the connections between these mechanisms and their implications for psychiatric disorders.

Currently, she serves as an Assistant Researcher at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS) within the University of Minho and is part of the STRESS.COM team.

Additionally, she holds positions as a Visiting Researcher at several prestigious institutions including the University of Oxford's Center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon, and the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her research utilizes large-scale brain models and advanced analytical tools like the LEiDA algorithm, which she developed to enhance our understanding of brain dynamics in health and disease.

Joana has been recognized for her contributions to science with multiple awards, including the 2019 L’Oréal Award for Women in Science in Portugal.

Mu-ming Poo

Scientific director, Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Director, Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Technology.

Biography:  Mu-ming Poo is the Scientific director of Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Director of Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Technology, and Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley.

He studied physics at Tsinghua University in Taiwan and received PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 1974. During 1976-2012, He had served on the faculty of UC Irvine, Yale, Columbia, and UCSD, and UC Berkeley.

He was the founding director of Institute of Neuroscience, CAS (1999-2019), and a member of Chinese Academy of Science, Academia Sinica, and Hong Kong Academy of Science, and an international member of US National Academy of Science. He was awarded Ameritec Prize, International Science & Technology Cooperation Award of P. R. China, and Gruber Neuroscience Prize. Poo’s research interest includes axon growth, synaptic plasticity, and the use non-human primates to study higher cognitive functions and human brain disorders.

He is the Executive Editor-in-Chief of National Science Review and the editorial board member for many journals, including Neuron and Progress in Neurobiology.

Anastasia Yendiki

Associate Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Associate Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.

Biography:  Anastasia Yendiki is Associate Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Associate Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She is the lead PI of the center for Large-scale Imaging of Neural Circuits (LINC), a multi-institutional consortium funded by the NIH BRAIN Initiative CONNECTS program, with the aim of imaging human and non-human primate brain circuitry across scales. 

Anastasia received her Ph.D in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she worked on inverse problems in tomographic image reconstruction. She then moved to the Martinos Center, first as a postdoc and then as a faculty member. There she developed TRACULA, the diffusion tractography toolbox in the FreeSurfer software package. Anastasia has served as MGH site PI of the Connectomes Related to Human Disease. 

She has also spearheaded the IronTract Challenge, an initiative bringing together tractography developers from around the world to compare and optimize the accuracy of their methods using gold standard post mortem data. 

Her current interests are in obtaining accurate models of white-matter fiber bundles from microscopy techniques, such as anatomic tracing and optical imaging, and developing methods that can take advantage of these post mortem models to infer connectional anatomy from in vivo diffusion MRI.

Andreas Heinz

Director and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Biography:  Andreas Heinz, a leading psychiatrist at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, focuses on the biological underpinnings of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and addiction. 

As director and Chair of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, and past President of the German Society of Biological Psychiatry, Heinz has significantly impacted biological psychiatry with his research on neurotransmitter functions. 

A member of the prestigious Leopoldina – National Academy of Sciences, his work extends to developing innovative treatments and influencing mental health policies globally, enhancing the understanding and care of psychiatric conditions.

Xiaoyin Chen

Assistant Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Biography:  Xiaoyin Chen is an assistant investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. The Chen Lab focuses on understanding the structures of brain circuits and its variations by using a multi-prone approach to interrogate circuit development, evolution, and variations. 

To do so, the Chen lab develops and leverages high-throughput in situ sequencing and barcoded connectomics techniques. Xiaoyin obtained his Ph.D training with Dr. Martin Chalfie at Columbia University, where he studied mechanosensation in the nematode C. elegans. Xiaoyin then joined Tony Zador’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a postdoc, where he developed BARseq, the first in situ sequencing-based barcoded connectomics technique. 

Xiaoyin was awarded the Kavli Institute Award for Distinguished Research in Neuroscience for his PhD thesis work. He was a Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain fellow and an O’Neil fellow during his postdoc work. He received the NIH New Innovator award and the Discovery award from the Department of Defense Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program. 

His works were featured by the NIH director’s Blog, BRAIN Initiative Alliance, and various news media including Nature, Spectrum, Technology Networks, etc.

Ye Ella Tian

Mary Lugton Postdoc Research Fellow at the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, University of Melbourne.

Biography:  Dr Tian is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, University of Melbourne. She is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist by training and holds a PhD in systems neuroscience. She works at the interface between neuroscience, computation and translational research of applying brain imaging techniques to clinical research. 

She is particularly interested in using systems and data-driven approaches to understand brain development and ageing and unveil neural mechanisms underpinning neuropsychiatric disorders. 

She leads the development of the now widely used Melbourne Subcortex Atlas. She currently holds the Mary Lugton Postdoc Fellowship, studying brain-body health in mental illness across the lifespan.

Viktor Jirsa

Director of Research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS. Director of the Institut de Neuroscience des Systèmes.

Biography:  Originally trained in Theoretical Physics and Philosophy in the 1990s, Dr. Jirsa has made contributions to the understanding of how network structure constrains the emergence of functional dynamics using methods from nonlinear dynamic system theory and computational neuroscience. 

Dr. Jirsa has been awarded several international and national awards for his research including the Francois Erbsmann Prize in 2001, NASPSPA Early Career Distinguished Scholar Award in 2004, and Grand Prix de Recherche de Provence in 2018. 

He serves on various Editorial Boards and has published more than 150 scientific articles and book chapters, as well as co-edited several books including the Handbook of Brain Connectivity. Dr. Jirsa is one of the Lead Scientists in the Human Brain Project and The Virtual Brain.

Valerie Voon

Distinguished Professor at Fudan University.

Biography:  Valerie is a Distinguished Professor at Fudan University and also has a highly prestigious Medical Research Council Senior Fellowship and is a Senior Principal Investigator and academic neuropsychiatrist at the University of Cambridge. 

Her research group across Shanghai and Cambridge focuses on identifying biomarkers sensitive to neuromodulation towards the development of precision closed-loop invasive and non-invasive neuromodulation. She uses a multimodal approach including cognitive neuroscience, computational psychiatry, neuromodulation, and neuroimaging. 

Her work focuses on addictions and compulsive disorders running both experimental studies and randomized controlled trials. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts in high impact journals including Neuron, Lancet Neurology, Molecular Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry and Brain with a high impact factor (71). 

She has multiple invitations to speak internationally. She is the current president of the British Neuropsychiatry Association.

Gerwin Schalk

Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder at Helios. Director of the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies.

Biography:  Dr. Schalk obtained his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Graz University of Technology in Austria, his M.S. in Information Technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, USA, and his Ph.D. in Computer and Systems Engineering from RPI. 

He is interested in integrating scientific, engineering, and clinical concepts to advance our understanding of the brain and to use this new understanding to develop novel neurotechnologies that improve people’s lives. 

He has authored or co-authored more than 130 peer-reviewed publications, one book and 17 chapters, has over 22,000 total citations and an H factor of 60. He has given more than 230 invited lectures world-wide.