A special honour for an outstand­ing brain researcher

Hector Fellow Katrin Amunts was appointed to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopold­ina and will be active in the Psychol­ogy and Cogni­tive Sciences Section. Leopold­ina is the oldest contin­u­ously exist­ing academy of natural sciences and medicine in the world. Leopold­ina selects its members among scien­tists who have distin­guished themselves through their outstand­ing scien­tific achievements.

Katrin Amunts is Direc­tor of the Insti­tute of Neuro­science and Medicine (INM‑1) at Forschungszen­trum Jülich and Direc­tor of the C. and O. Vogt Insti­tute for Brain Research at Heinrich Heine Univer­sity Düssel­dorf. The inter­na­tion­ally renowned researcher was scien­tific direc­tor of the European flagship "Human Brain Project" (HBP), which was success­fully completed in summer 2023.

Katrin Amunts and her research team were able to map the human brain on an unprece­dented scale using extremely high-resolu­tion and data-inten­sive methods. In doing so, Amunts also pioneered the inter­dis­ci­pli­nary combi­na­tion of neuro­science and super­com­put­ing. The results of this research are combined in a globally unique 3D brain atlas, which is openly acces­si­ble to scien­tists from all over the world.