IRTG student Sailee Shikhare has received the RWTH completion grant for her doctoral project Quantifier comprehension and processing – Role of language and numerical processing.

We congratulate and wish her all the best for her research.

Congratulations to Vanessa Pütz! She has kicked off the year not only with a Poster Prize at the 5th annual Social & Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) Conference this year, her abstract was also nominated as being among the top 5% of conference submissions. The International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium will be awarding her a $500 travel grant to go to the conference.

On top of that, Vanessa also received the Volkwagen Foundation grant to attend the Herrenhäuser Conference on "Mental Health Throughout Life" in Hannover this April!

Vanessa's office with a view (at UPenn):

The Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics as well as scientists from the Forschungszentrum Jülich contribute to the Human Brain Project. The European Union decided to support this project as part of its FET Flagship initiative with an amount of 1 Billion Euros.

It is the ambitious aim of the 10-year-project to create “a virtual human brain in which the spatial organization from the level of the molecule up to the complex system function will be captured”, as Prof. Katrin Amunts explains. Prof. Schneider says that "the framework of the project enables to bundle the scientific expertise and manpower in order to be able to study and map the organization and the processing mechanisms of the brain on all levels and in its whole complexity".

For more information please visit:

UKAachen

Jara HPC Jülich

The 7thWinter School was held from the 31st of October until the 4th of November in Aachen, Germany.

Since Hurricane Sandy kept us tense until the very start, we were especially happy to nevertheless finally  welcome most of our colleagues from UPenn in Aachen.  Our program for the four days included short presentations of ongoing studies and finished dissertation projects from 30 students. A discussion of the projects followed in thesis committee meetings, which gave new, valuable impulses and will strengthen the students in their progress. Also new PhD and MD students from Aachen took part in the annual winter school. These students will be the last cohort to take part in the IRTG 1328, which will terminate in 2015.

Highly interesting invited talks were held from Beate Herpertz-Dahlmann and Kerstin Konrad on “Adolescence and adolescence motherhood” or from Sonja Gruen on “Dynamics and interaction in the cortical network”. The stimulating symposia on “Diffusion-MEG multimodal imaging” from Tim Roberts and Bill Gaetz as well as „The neuroscience of relational thinking“ by Anjan Chatterjee completed the rich scientific program.

Since the Winter School also included social events like an excursion to Maastricht and several joint evenings, new contacts were made and existing friendships were deepened. We are now looking forward to another year of fruitful, common work and to our next Winter School, which will be held in Philadelphia.

Eliza Alawi and Vanessa Pütz received Poster Awards on the conference NeuroVisionen 8, which took place the 26th October in Aachen.

NeuroVisionen is a conference for young academics, organized by the NeuroNRW, a network from different universities. The aim of this network is the promotion and encouragement of interdisciplinary and application-oriented research projects for junior scientists.