André Aleman (1975) studied neuropsychology and psychophysiology at Utrecht University. He received his PhD with the highest distinction (cum laude) from Utrecht University in 2001 – his thesis was on the cognitive basis of hallucinations. In 2006, Aleman was appointed Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry at the University Medical Centre Groningen in Groningen, the Netherlands. Currently, he is also Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center at the Department of Biomedical Sciences of Cells and Systems. In 2015, he was appointed Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Shenzhen, China. He received a European Young Investigator Award in 2006 from the European Science Foundation. In 2011 and 2012, he received grants (1.5M each) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO-VICI) and the European Research Council (ERC Starting/Consolidator Grant).

André Aleman was elected as a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) in 2017 and is a member of the Netherlands Health Council. He serves as an academic editor for PLoS ONE and is a member of the editorial board of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, npj Schizophrenia, and Schizophrenia Research: Cognition.

Besides being (co)author of more than 350 scientific articles (h-index = 89), he published four popular science books. One of them, Our ageing brain, was translated into eight languages. His current research interest regards the neural basis of cognitive and affective disorders in people with psychiatric disorders and in the elderly, with an emphasis on cognition-emotion interactions and treatment with non-invasive brain stimulation.

Marco Catani is a clinical neuroscientist specialised in neuropsychiatry. He has used tractography to describe novel pathways of the human brain and the clinical syndrome associated to their damage. He received an Investigator award from The Wellcome Trust (2014-2021) and since 2015 has contributed as section editor for the central nervous system to the Gray’s Anatomy textbook. Many of the pathways he described are now included in the new Terminologia Neuroanatomica approved in 2019 by the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists (IFAA). In 2012 he received the Norman Geschwind prize in Behavioural Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology and in 2015 the Award for Outstanding Book in the History of the Neurosciences for the book Brain Renaissance.

His main interests lie on the neuroanatomy of language, behaviour, and social cognition.

Maurizio Corbetta is a neurologist-neuroscientist interested on how the brain mediates cognitive functions, and the mechanisms of neurological recovery after injury.

In the early 1990 he performed some of first brain imaging studies of human cognition.  His review on attention systems with Gordon Shulman has been cited more than 10,000 times. He discovered the dorsal and ventral attention networks, and developed methods for mapping them with task and rest fMRI. He described the neurophysiological mechanisms of spontaneous brain activity with EEG/MEG. More recently, he has focused on the neurological mechanism of injury and recovery showing that local lesions have widespread effects on brain dynamics and behavior.

He is currently working on whole brain computer models of brain injury, and ways to restore function through rehabilitation and stimulation.

I am a cognitive neurologist, obtained a PhD at the KU Leuven, with a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer Disease Centre, Northwestern University, Chicago, US. I am currently director of the Memory Clinic Neurology at the University Hospitals Leuven (http://www.uzleuven.be/geheugenkliniek/), and principal investigator of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neurology KU Leuven (http://med.kuleuven.be/lcn/). The memory clinic of the University Hospitals Leuven provides early diagnosis, treatment and care for home dwelling patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) across the disease spectrum with a special interest in early-onset dementia as well as atypical variants (primary progressive aphasia, posterior cortical atrophy).

At the Laboratory for Cognitive Neurology we combine studies in healthy volunteers with studies in patients with neurodegenerative disease within the domains of language and semantic memory. We aim to integrate the different levels, from molecular aggregates measured by means of PET, over functional cognitive brain circuits using task-related fMRI, to cognitive manifestations.