Thalamus Anatomy and Connectomics

Prof. Jürgen Mai is a Professor of Neuroanatomy at Duesseldorf University. He has made significant contributions to the field of neuroscience. He has co-authored books such as The "Atlas of the Human Brain" and "The Human Nervous System," which have become standard references for the anatomy of the human's central and peripheral nervous system.
Prof. Mai's research focuses on the anatomy of the human thalamus, and his unique perspectives would make him an excellent speaker for the conference.

Marcel Oberlaender is leading the ‘In Silico Brain Sciences’ group at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior in Bonn and he is an Associate Professor at the VU Amsterdam. His research aims to unravel cellular and circuit mechanisms by which the cerebral cortex transforms sensory signals into perception. To achieve this goal, his lab develops anatomically and functionally realistic models of the thalamocortical, cortical and subcortical circuits in the rodent brain. With these models, they perform multi-scale simulations to disentangle in silico – and then test via manipulations in vivo – how the interplay between cellular and circuit mechanisms implements sensation and perception. 

Manojkumar Saranathan is a Professor of Radiology at UMass Chan Medical School and an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering. 
Dr. Saranathan's contribution to thalamus research includes his work on multi-atlas thalamic nuclei segmentation on standard T1-weighed MRI with application to normal aging. He has also studied the differential vulnerability of thalamic nuclei in multiple sclerosis. His research has helped to advance our understanding of the role of the thalamus in various pathologies.

Meritxell Bach Cuadra is a Senior Lecturer and Privat Docent at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV). She is also affiliated with the Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM) and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
Dr. Bach Cuadra's contribution to the field of thalamus research includes her work on computational neuroanatomy, medical image analysis, magnetic resonance imaging, machine learning, image reconstruction, segmentation, fetal imaging, multiple sclerosis, and human thalamus². Her research has helped to advance our understanding of the role of the thalamus in various pathologies.

Tobias Staudigl is a Professor at the Department of Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His research focuses on the neural mechanisms of memory and navigation in humans during sleep and wake, using a multimodal approach with an emphasis on invasive and non-invasive electrophysiology.
In particular, he is interested in the role of the thalamus in these cognitive processes, which he is investigating in an ERC StG funded project focused on human intracranial recordings. His research has included work on thalamocortical rhythms during visual perception as well as sleep oscillations in the human thalamus. 

Laura Busse is a Professor of Systemic Neuroscience within the Division of Neurobiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her lab studies context-dependent visual processing in mouse models by performing large-scale in vivo electrophysiological recordings in awake and behaving mice's thalamic and cortical circuits.
In particular, she is interested in the role of cortico-thalamic feedback in modulating activity in the thalamus's dorsolateral geniculate (dLGN) and the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN). Her ongoing projects work with transgenic mice expressing Cre-recombinase in L6 cortico-thalamic pyramidal cells and use optogenetic and chemogenetic methods to probe their impact on thalamic activity causally.
Dr. Busse's contribution to thalamus research includes her work on context-dependent visual processing, focusing on the role of cortico-thalamic feedback in modulating activity in the thalamus. Her research has helped to advance our understanding of the role of the thalamus in various cognitive processes.

László Acsády is the Head of the Thalamus Research Laboratory at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Budapest, Hungary. 
Dr. Acsády's contribution to thalamus research includes his work on the interactions between the cortex and thalamus. His research has helped to advance our understanding of the role of the thalamus in various cognitive processes.

Thomas Tourdias is a Professor of Radiology at the University of Bordeaux (France). He is the head of the neuroimaging department at the University Hospital. He leads a collaborative research program called IMPACT for "IMaging for Precision medicine within A Collaborative Translation program". His areas of expertise are in advanced MRI techniques, including diffusion, perfusion, and functional imaging.
His contribution to the thalamus research includes the development of a multi-atlas segmentation technique called THOMAS (THalamus Optimized Multi-Atlas Segmentation), which uses white-matter-nulled MP-RAGE imaging to segment the thalamus nuclei. He also investigates the thalamus microstructure in different disorders. 

Ismail Koubiyr is an Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Neurosciences at Amsterdam UMC. His research focuses on using advanced MRI techniques to study multiple sclerosis, including developing new tools to analyze structural and functional MRI.
His contribution to the thalamus research includes the thalamus and its role in cognitive processes in health and disorders.

Dr. Giulio Pergola, Ph.D., is interested in the mechanisms that make humans different from one another: genetics, environmental factors, and their combined impact on the brain. His work moves from considering that nature and nurture determine our experience and related brain changes. As inter-individual differences depend on genes and experience, he investigates developmental trajectories and how people can change them with training or novel drug development. His vision is to translate research into actionable knowledge to afford opportunities – particularly to adolescents and individuals at risk of mental illness – to change the course of their life. 
Dr. Pergola's research has helped to advance our understanding of the role of the thalamus in various cognitive and psychiatric processes. 

W. Martin Usrey received his PhD from Duke University working with David Fitzpatrick and did his postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School with Clay Reid before joining the faculty at the University of California, Davis, where he is a Professor and Department Chair. 
His research is focused on understanding neural circuits for vision with an emphasis on feedforward and feedback interactions between thalamus and cortex.

Julie Vidal is a researcher at Paul Sabatier University - Toulouse, France.
Dr. Vidal's contribution to the field of thalamus research includes her work on the development of HIPS, a fast preprocessing step that synthesizes WMn-like image contrast from standard T1w MRI using a polynomial approximation. This technique could potentially be useful for studying the thalamus and its nuclei.

Annalisa is a researcher at the University of Bari Aldo Moro (UNIBA) in Italy. Her research interests involve the development of a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between genetics, environmental factors, and the thalamus and how they contribute to human differences in health and psychiatric disorders. Specifically, her research focuses on investigating whether variation in thalamus-related structural/functional connectivity patterns could qualify as a potential biomarker for severe mental illnesses and their risk, with a specific focus on schizophrenia. 

Petra Ritter is a Professor of Brain Simulation at the Department of Neurology at Charité in Berlin. She is also the Head of the Brain Simulation Section at the Berlin Institute of Health. Her field is computational neuroscience, and her focus is on developing brain simulations for individuals with neurological conditions, combining EEG and neuroimaging data.
Her work on developing brain simulations for individuals with neurological conditions is exceptionally relevant to studying the thalamus and its role in various pathologies.

Birte Forstmann is a Professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is also the Head of the Quantitative Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on understanding the brain mechanisms that allow people to adapt quickly to changes in their environment, combining mathematical modeling with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), ultra-high resolution 7T MRI, electroencephalography (EEG), and postmortem work.
Her work on understanding the brain mechanisms that allow people to adapt quickly to changes in their environment is relevant to studying the thalamus and its role in various cognitive processes.

Roberta is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bari Aldo Moro (UNIBA) in Italy. Her research interests include the individual characterization of human behavior shaped by neurodevelopment, genetics, and environment. Her main goal is to define changes in brain functional correlates that reflect experience and neurodevelopmental processes in both psychological and psychopathological conditions through multimodal brain functional connectivity.  Specifically, she employed an innovative approach to characterize inter-individual variability in the recruitment of distinct cortico-thalamic networks, which possibly supports learning abilities.