Karen Doyle is Associate Professor in Physiology and Principal Investigator. Her research involves studying the causes of neurovascular stress and investigating novel strategies to protect brain tissue from damage due to stroke. Dr Doyle’s group is investigating the characteristics of human blood clots that cause occlusive strokes to inform medical device design and the discovery of novel biomarkers to advance stroke diagnosis and treatment. Dr Doyle is also investigating the pathophysiology of stroke in the brain and the effect of reperfusion strategy on the survival of brain tissue.

Dr Michaela Fencková was introduced to neurobiology during her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Annette Schenck, at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. She was hired on FP7-EU funded consortium GENCODYS to study genetic causes of neurodevelopmental disorders. When she learned that she can do it with Drosophila, the model with which she did her first experiments as an undergraduate, she found it a perfect match. She discovered that flies with genetic mutations equivalent to those found in individuals with intellectual disability (ID) frequently manifest with deficits in habituation, a conserved, fundamental form of learning that is at the base of high cognitive functions. When she focused on genes that were next to ID also associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the frequency of habituation deficits was even higher – every second gene turned out to be important for habituation. Because habituation can be assessed in both flies and humans, and several studies showed defective habituation in ID and ASD individuals, she realized that it can be used as a translational readout. With this idea, Michaela has established a research laboratory at the University of South Bohemia where she studies the neuronal mechanisms of habituation to understand cognitive dysfunction in ID/ASD and identify treatment targets. She also investigates novel genetic causes of ID/ASD that include patient-specific missense variants and the effect of environmental factors on cognitive dysfunction in ID/ASD. In 2023, she received an EMBO Installation Grant and a national L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award.

Ana João Rodrigues is a Group leader at ICVS, and an invited Professor at the School of Medicine of University of Minho. Her team has been allying fundamental with clinical research, combining rodent and human data, using a variety of techniques to find mechanistic explanations on how reward and aversion are encoded in the mammalian brain. Additionally, her work explores how stress during critical developmental periods can leave long-lasting imprints on these neural processes, potentially resulting in maladaptive behaviours such as depression and addiction. Ana is actively involved in teaching, contributing to national and international graduate programs, including the prestigious Cajal Training Programme. She is also committed to science outreach, having coordinated numerous initiatives aimed at promoting science dissemination and health literacy among the general public for several years.

Domna Karagogeos is a Professor of Molecular Biology-Developmental Neurobiology at the University of Crete Medical School (GR) and group leader at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB). She holds a PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology from Harvard University. Before establishing her own group in Crete, she has done postdoctoral research on axon guidance in the Center of Neurobiology and Behavior and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Columbia University (US). Her research involves the elucidation of cellular and molecular
signals involved in neuronal migrations, especially in cortical interneurons and the interactions between axons and myelin, especially as it pertains to de- and remyelination and the role of glial cells. She uses mouse genetics, advanced imaging, primary cultures and functional assays. She has been involved in teaching developmental neurobiology in many national and international graduate programs. She has been a CHET member and past CHET chair and has participated in establishing training best practices for Neuroscience students in Europe.

Daniel Wójcik is a physicist by training. He worked on the interface of classical and quantum chaos and statistical physics. In 2003, after two postdocs in physics (University of Maryland, College Park and Georgia Institute of Technology), he moved to the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Science where he started work in neuroscience. He is currently a professor of neuroscience and the head of the Laboratory of Neuroinformatics at Nencki. He was the Head of the PhD Studies at the Nencki Institute for a decade and the first Chair of the Programme Board of the Warsaw PhD School in Natural and BioMedical Sciences. He is a member of the Pan-Europe Regional Committee of the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO-PERC) and a member of the FENS-CHET committee by nomination from IBRO-PERC. He was the Polish Representative at the International INCF Governing Board (2007-2015); the Governing Board Member and Treasurer of the Polish Society for Neuroscience (2011-2015); a Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences Neurobiology Committee (since 2011, Deputy Chair since 2020) and the Director of the Organization for Computational Neuroscience (2015-2017).

His main goal as a CHET member is to promote mathematics and computations as well as reproducible science as core topics of neuroscience education and liaison with IBRO-PERC.