Professor Jie Sui received a Ph.D. degree in cognitive neuroscience from Peking University, China. She is a Full Professor in the School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, UK. Before moving to Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2019, she was a Principal Investigator at the University of Oxford and a Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Bath. Her laboratory research has employed fMRI, EEG, lesion symptom mapping, mathematical models, and machine learning techniques to understand neural substrates of social biases and how aberrant self-representation leads to different mental disorders or brain disorders. Her recent work has demonstrated the existence of neural circuits for driving biases to self- and reward-related stimuli operating in parallel with the neural circuits supporting cognitive control. She has been selected as an IEEE senior member and received the Mid-Career Prize 2023, presented by the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience, in recognition of her distinguished contribution to research in cognitive neuroscience. She has served on several editorial boards and as a reviewer for numerous grants in the UK and internationally.
Dr. Pia Rotshtein started her academic journey at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She was introduced to f/MRI at the lab of Talma Handler. In 2002, she moved to London to complete a Wellcome Prize Ph.D. at the Institute of Neurology, University College London. Upon completing her Ph.D. in 2005, she moved to the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. In 2010, she became a faculty member in the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. In 2022, she moved to the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, in order to manage the University's Neuroimaging Research Unit (UH-NRU). In her research, she focuses on cognition, examining how the brain processes information, and how life experiences and insults modify the way our brain works. Her research interests follow three main themes: (1) social, emotion, and motivation; (2) complex actions; and (3) cognition across the lifespan, with a specialty in cognition in aging following stroke and dementia.
Dr. Magdalena Chechlacz initially trained and carried out a doctorate in cellular and molecular biology (2002). After working as a biologist (University of California, San Diego) she decided on a career change to a more human-oriented science and neuroimaging. In order to gain formal training in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, she completed a second doctorate in psychology at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Glyn Humphreys (2012). From 2013 to 2016, she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and EPA Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellowship, Linacre College at the University of Oxford. In 2016, she returned to the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, as a BRIDGE Fellow. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Human Brain Health and School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. Her recent research focuses on understanding how inter-individual variability in the neurochemical, structural, and functional organization of the brain affects cognitive aging. Her work combines cognitive testing with advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods and genomics to provide mechanistic models of age-related cognitive decline and insights into the heterogeneity of aging trajectories. Some of her current projects examine multidimensional associations between sociodemographic factors, sleep, genetic makeup, brain networks, and decline in attention function in the elderly population.
