Maria Giulia PretiMaria Giulia Preti received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy) in 2013, after her M. Sc. (2009) and B. Sc. (2007) in Biomedical Engineering, as well at Politecnico di Milano. During her Ph.D., mentored by Prof. Giuseppe Baselli, she focused on advanced techniques of brain magnetic resonance imaging, in particular she developed a method of groupwise fMRI-guided tractography, that revealed to be useful in the in-vivo investigation of the pathophysiological changes across the evolution of Alzheimers disease. For this project, she had been collaborating full-time with the hospital Fondazione Don Gnocchi in Milan (Magnetic Resonance Laboratory). In 2011, she was awarded a Progetto Rocca fellowship from MIT-Italy and spent a visiting research period at the MIT and Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA), under the supervision of Prof. Nikos Makris, where she could focus on the anatomical study of specific neruonal bundles.
She has joined Prof. Van De Ville group at EPFL as a post-doc in 2013. Her current research aims at understanding the connections between brain functionality and brain microscopic anatomy by using advanced techniques of Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In particular, she is working on functional MRI, functional connectivity, diffusion tensor imaging and tractography, integration of MRI with other techniques (e.g. EEG), and the application of these methods to several clinical contexts, e.g., epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, multiple sclerosis, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Bruno HerbelinSince 10/09 - Scientist Laboratory of cognitive neuroscience Brain & Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. 06/12 - 10/19 Deputy Director Center for Neuroprosthetics École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. 11/05 - 09/09 Assistant Professor Aalborg University Esbjerg Institute of Technology & Copenhagen Institute of Technology, Denmark. 07/01 - 09/05 Research assistant PhD student Virtual Reality Laboratory School of Computer and Communications, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
Sean Lewis HillSean Hill is co-Director of Blue Brain, a Swiss national brain initiative, where he leads the Neuroinformatics division, based at the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland. He also directs the Laboratory for the Neural Basis of Brain States at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Dr. Hill served as the Executive Director (2011-2013) and Scientific Director (2014-2016) of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Hill has extensive experience in building and simulating large-scale models of brain circuitry and has also supervised and led research efforts exploring the principles underlying the structure and dynamics of neocortical and thalamocortical microcircuitry. He currently serves in management and advisory roles on several large-scale clinical informatics initiatives around the world. After completing his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, Dr. Hill held postdoctoral positions at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, then joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center where he served as the Project Manager for Computational Neuroscience at Blue Brain until his appointment at the EPFL.
