Katrin Amunts

Katrin Amunts is a German neuroscientist, and well known for her work in human brain mapping. To better understand the organizational principles of the human brain, she and her team have created the cytoarchitectonic Julich-Brain atlas, as a basis to integrate multi-level and multi-scale brain data into a common reference brain and use methods of high-performance computing to generate ultra-high resolution human brain models. Katrin Amunts is a full professor of Brain Research and director of the C. and O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research, Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf (since 2013), and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Center Juelich. From 2016 to 2023, she was the Scientific research director of the European flagship, the Human Brain Project. Since 2023 she is Joint Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the EBRAINS AISBL.

She did a postdoctoral fellowship at the C. & O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Duesseldorf University, Germany, and set up a new research unit for Brain Mapping at the Research Center Juelich, Germany. In 2004, she became a professor for Structural-Functional Brain Mapping, and in 2008 a full professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the RWTH Aachen University as well as director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at the Research Center Juelich. Katrin Amunts is a member of the editorial board of Brain Structure and Function. She was a member of the German Ethics Council 2012-2020. Katrin Amunts is the program speaker of the program Decoding the Human Brain of the Helmholtz Association, Germany. Since 2017 Katrin Amunts is co-speaker of the graduate school Max-Planck School of Cognition and since 2018 she is a member of the International Advisory Council Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives, Canada. In 2024 Katrin Amunts was appointed to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and will be active in the Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Section.