Ole Kiehn is a currently Professor in Integrative Neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Professor in Neurophysiology at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He received his MD in 1985 and Dr Sci. in 1990 from the University of Copenhagen and was a postdoc at Cornell University, US. He studies the organisation of neuronal circuits that execute movements. His work has identified key elements of spinal circuitries necessary for producing changes in timing and coordination of locomotion and delineated the diversification of brainstem circuits involved in the episodic expression or context-dependent selection of locomotor behaviour. His work demonstrates translational potential in developing therapies for movement disorders caused by trauma or disease to the nervous system. Kiehn’s work has been recognized with the Schellenberg Prize, Kirsten and Freddy Johansen’s preclinical prize, The Brain Prize (2022), Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg’s Professorship, a distinguished professorship award at KI, ERC advanced grants. He is an elected member of EMBO, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Academia Europea and the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet (since 2008) and the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine (2014-2019).

Professor Irene Tracey is Vice Chancellor at the University of Oxford and was FENS President during 2022 – 2024. She is a former Warden of Merton College, Oxford, as well as Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience and Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She did her undergraduate and graduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, where she focused her research on the early use of magnetic resonance imaging methods to study disease mechanisms in humans. Subsequent to a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, she was a founding member of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and was its director from 2005 until 2015.

Alongside senior leadership roles within the University, Irene has served and continues to serve on many national and international committees, such as the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), British Neuroscience Association, the Lundbeck Brain Prize Committee and by appointment of the government, the UK Medical Research Council.

She is a passionate advocate for women in science and is involved in several mentorship schemes. Over the past 25 years, her multidisciplinary research team has contributed to a better understanding of pain perception, pain relief and nociceptive processing within the injured and non-injured human central nervous system using advanced neuroimaging techniques and novel paradigm designs. They have also been investigating the neural basis of altered states of consciousness induced by anaesthetic agents.

Carmen Sandi is a Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), where she leads the Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics at the Brain Mind Institute, that she directed from 2012-2018. She is co-Director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research Synapsy and founder and co-President of the Swiss Stress Network.

She studies the impact and mechanisms whereby stress and personality affect brain and behavior, with a focus on motivation and the social domain, and on the contribution of mitochondria and metabolism. Her lab adopts an integrative research program in rodents and humans.

Carmen Sandi has published over 200 research articles. She has received numerous awards and honours, including the Ron de Kloet Prize for Stress Research, Valkhof Chair at Radboud University, Visiting Professor at Rockefeller University and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist Fellowship at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. President of the European Brain and Behavior Society (EBBS), she currently is member of the executive councils of the European Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society (EMCCS) and EBBS, Chair of the ALBA Network, President of the Cajal Advanced Neuroscience Training Programme, and the immediate past-President of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS).