Megan R. Carey is a Group Leader in the Neuroscience Program at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. She received her PhD in 2005 from the University of California, San Francisco, where her thesis was awarded UCSF’s Krevans Distinguished Dissertation Award. After a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Carey started her independent laboratory at the Champalimaud. Her lab combines quantitative behavioral analysis, genetics, and physiology to understand how the brain controls learned and coordinated movements.

Dr. Carey was an International Early Career Scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and her lab is funded by the European Research Council. She serves on the Board of Reviewing Editors for eLife and the Board of Directors of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement and the ALBA Network for Equity and Diversity in Brain Sciences. She has co-Chaired the Gordon Research Conference on the Cerebellum, COSYNE, and the FENS-Cajal summer course on the Behavior of Neural Systems. Dr. Carey has taken on broader leadership roles within Europe as the Chair of the FENS Kavli Network of Excellence (a network of early-mid career European neuroscience PIs), and as a high-level policy advisor to the European Commissioner for Research & Innovation.

Peter Dayan did his PhD in Edinburgh, postdocs at the Salk Institute and Toronto. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and
Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and was a founding faculty member of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, which he then ran for 15
years.

He is currently a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and a Professor at the University of Tübingen. His interests include affective decision making and neural reinforcement learning.

Guillén Fernández is serving as the Scientific Director of the Radboud University Medical Center, Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute and professor for cognitive neuroscience at Radboud University. His research focuses on the brain basis of memory, emotion, and their interaction, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines cognitive neuroimaging, genetics, pharmacology, and various clinical disciplines. Guillén Fernández is a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion, a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Academia Europaea, and the Memory Disorder Research Society. He has received numerous awards, including the Richard-Jung Award from the German Society for Clinical Neurophysiology, the Vici Award from the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research, the Radboud Science Award, and an Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council.

Denis Jabaudon is currently a professor at the University of Geneva, the Director of the Geneva University Neurocenter, and also practices as a clinical neurologist at Geneva University Hospital. His work is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Research Council (Advanced grant). Pr. Jabaudon’s research focuses on understanding how genetic and input-dependent mechanisms interact to control neuronal circuit assembly during cortical development. His laboratory has identified key mechanisms underlying the generation of neuronal diversity during corticogenesis, including showing that electric properties of cortical progenitors are instrumental to generate different types of neurons, identifying sequential molecular steps involved in cortical neuron generation, and revealing that cortical progenitors retain the ability to generate normally previously-born neurons. Denis Jabaudon is FENS KAVLI network of excellence alumnus and his research has earned him several awards including the Cloetta prize and Robert Bing Prize .