Top-class keynote speakers at DGKN23

Gustavo Deco is Research Professor at the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) and Professor (Catedrático)  at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) where he leads the Computational Neuroscience group. He is also Director of the Center of Brain and Cognition (UPF). In 1987 he received his PhD in Physics for his thesis on Relativistic Atomic Collisions. In 1987, he was a postdoc at the University of Bordeaux in France. From 1988 to 1990, he obtained a postdoc of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Giessen in Germany. From 1990 to 2003, he leads the Computational Neuroscience Group at Siemens Corporate Research Center in Munich, Germany. He obtained in 1997 his Habilitation (maximal academical degree in Germany) in Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat. habil.) at the Technical University of Munich for his thesis on Neural Learning. In 2001, he received his PhD in Psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich.

Professor Dr. Sten Grillner is a Swedish neurophysiologist and professor at the Karolinska Institute's Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology in Stockholm. He is considered one of the world’s foremost experts in the cellular bases of motor behaviour. His research is focused on the extraordinary capability of the brain to control movement. In particular, he has shown how neuronal circuits in the spine help control rhythmic movements, such as those needed for locomotion. Grillner studied at the medical faculty in Gothenburg, Sweden, and received his PhD in neurophysiology in 1969. He has been a professor and director of the Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology at the Karolinska Institute since 1987. His research has focused on understanding the cellular bases of motor behaviour. Early on he demonstrated that networks within the mammalian spinal cord can produce the detailed motor pattern of locomotion involving the coordination of hundreds of different muscles. His later work is directed towards understanding the forebrain mechanisms underlying selection of behavior, and has shown that the organization of the basal ganglia, dopamine system, habenulae and pallium is evolutionary conserved in considerable detail over more than 500 million years.

Ed Bullmore trained in clinical medicine at the University of Oxford and St Bartholomew’s 
Hospital in London, then worked as a Lecturer in Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, before specialist clinical training in psychiatry at St George’s Hospital and then the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital London. His research career started in the early 1990s as a Wellcome Trust (Advanced) Research Fellow and was initially focused on mathematical analysis of neurophysiological time series. Since moving to Cambridge as Professor of Psychiatry in 1999, his interest in human brain function and structure has increasingly focused on complex brain networks identified in MRI and other brain scanning data. 
Since 2005, he has worked half-time for GlaxoSmithKline as Head of GSK’s Clinical Unit in 
Cambridge and Vice-President, Experimental Medicine. He is Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust/GSK funded training programme in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, Clinical Director of the Wellcome Trust/MRC funded Behavioural & Clinical Neuroscience Institute, and an honorary Consultant Psychiatrist and Director of R&D in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Foundation NHS Trust. 
He has published about 350 scientific papers and he has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Prof. Maurizio Corbetta is the former Norman J. Stupp Professor of Neurology, and Professor of Radiology, Anatomy and Neurobiology, and Bioengineering at Washington University School of Medicine. From 2001-to 2016 he was the Chief of the Division of Neuro-Rehabilitation, and Director of Neurological Rehabilitation at Washington University.

As of October 1, 2016 Dr. Corbetta is Full Professor and Chair of Neurology in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Padua, Italy. He is also the founding director of the new Padua Neuroscience Center, a highly interdisciplinary research programme centered on the idea of brain networks in health and society.

Prof. Corbetta has pioneered experiments on the neural mechanisms of human attention using Positron Emission Tomography (PET). He has discovered two brain networks dedicated to attention control, the dorsal and ventral attention networks, and developed a brain model of attention that has been cited in the literature more than 5,000 times. His clinical work has focused on the physiological correlates of focal injury. He has developed a pathogenetic model of the syndrome of hemispatial neglect.

Professor Dr. Sabine Kastner is a German-born American cognitive neuroscientist. She is professor of psychology at the Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University, NJ, USA. Kastner studied at the Universities of Göttingen and of Düsseldorf, at the Institute of Neurology (London) and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Göttingen) and earned degrees in both medicine and neuroscience. After obtainining her PhD for work on the visual perception she became interested in cognition, studying neural correlates of visual search in the monkey visual system. Kastner then joined the National Institute of Mental Health, where she pioneered translating mechanistic principles from primate physiology into functional brain imaging studies in humans.  In her laboratory at Princeton University, Kastner established the functional architecture of the attention network and defined functional principles for space-, feature and object-based attention. In addition, she has studied various aspects of visual perception in the healthy, adult primate brain as well as in patients with brain lesions and during development. Combining functional brain imaging with intracranial electrophysiology, Kastner studies the human and non-human primate brain in direct comparison with the goal to establish functional principles underlying cognition that can be linked to behavior at the level of cognitive large-scale networks. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences, the National German Academy Leopoldina and will receive the George A. Miller Award in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2023.