Markus Wöhr

Markus Wöhr, Dr. rer. nat. (Ph.D.), is a biological psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist, presently holding a Young Investigator Group Leader position at the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany. At present, he is also holding a Visiting Associate Professor position at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, School of Medicine, Stanford University, USA. He has a broad background in animal behavior and translational research models for neuropsychiatric dysfunctions, with specific training and expertise in behavioral neuroscience of affective and neurodevelopmental disorders. His main research interests include neurobiological mechanisms underlying social behavior, acoustic communication through ultrasonic vocalizations, and socio-affective information processing in rodents.

Jeffrey Burgdorf

Jeffrey Burgdorf, Ph.D. is a neuropsychopharmacologist and is presently both a Research Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University and the Director of Discovery Science at Aptinyx Inc in Evanston, Illinois. Using rat ultrasonic calls as a model of positive and negative affect, he has contributed to the development of novel therapeutics for psychiatric disorders.  Recently, using a neuroethological approach to the study of ultrasonic vocalizations, he has proposed a new model of emotion processing in the brain and is currently developing a novel translational EEG-based measure of emotion based on his findings.

Stefan Brudzynski

Stefan M. Brudzynski, Ph.D. (Univ. of Łódź), D.Sc. (PAN, Warsaw), is a neurophysiologist and neuroscientist, presently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Professor Brudzynski, a former Director of the Centre of Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology and Biology at Brock University, is the recipient of the prestigious Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society for his contribution to the field of Behavioral Neuroscience.

Professor Brudzynski is editor of two handbooks on mammalian vocalization and ultrasonic vocalization published by Academic Press/ Elsevier and recipient of the Elsevier Award for exceptional contribution to the quality of Behavioural Brain Research. Professor Brudzynski’s main research interests are in the neural regulation of animal behavior, and particularly, central control of ultrasonic vocalization and communication in rodents. His current research is focused on vocal expression of emotional states and brain systems for emotional arousal.

Nicola Simola

Nicola Simola, M.Sc., Ph.D. is a neuropharmacologist and neuroscientist. He is currently Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Cagliari, Italy.

His main research interests involve the neuropharmacology and neurotoxicology of psychostimulants and the neuropharmacology of dopaminomimetic drugs in experimental rodent models of addiction and neurodegenerative diseases. Prof. Simola has authored more than 70 publications in international scientific journals and books, and has edited one scientific book and two special issues in international scientific journals.

Agnieszka Potasiewicz

Dr Agnieszka Potasiewicz obtained her Ph.D. in 2018. The title of her Ph.D. studies was „The effects of ligands of the alpha7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on impaired cognitive processes in animal models of schizophrenia”. Currently, she is the post-doc in the Department of Behavioural Neuroscience and Drug Development, Maj Institute of Pharmacology, Cracow, Poland. Agnieszka’s scientific interest is focused on the research of novel pharmacotherapies of the negative symptoms and cognitive impairment in schizophrenia.

Adam Hamed

Adam Hamed, Ph.D. is a neuropsychopharmacologist, pharmacist and neuroscientist, presently researcher in Laboratory of Spatial Memory, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences. His main research is related to individual differences in the activation of the reward system controlled by the emission of ultrasonic vocalization, and biological and neurochemical basis of this phenomena. His research interest is focused on building neurochemical maps (patterns) of activation of the reward system in different behavioral models related to social interactions, drug addiction, and reward prediction. This kind of maps will provide finding new potential mechanisms of drug action in many neuropsychiatric disorders related to reward processing.

Michał Biały

Michał Biały, Ph.D., is a biologist specializing in sexual behavior of rats as a model of motivation, as contains inheritable, in assumption genetically and hormonally evolutionarily preserved, well defined neuronal networks as well as elements modified by experience. Since 1988 till now he has worked at the Department of Physiology, Medical University of Warsaw. The experimental part of his master’s thesis was done at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology PAS in Warsaw. Ph.D. thesis at Leszek Kaczmarek laboratory was focused at the changes in the expression of the early c-fos response gene in the rat’s brain as an indicator of the emotional state memory based on an acquisition of the sexual experience; post-doctoral fellowship at the State University of Connecticut USA, at the lab of prof. Benjamin Sachs. At the nineties, Michał Biały became interested in the ultrasonic vocalization in male rats as a parameter describing the rewarding value of sexual behavior and the memory of emotional states. His field of interest also includes the pharmacological and neurohormonal basis of this behavior.

Miron Kursa

Miron Kursa holds M.Sc. in Physics and Ph.D. in Computer Science, works for Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw, where he teaches data science. He is and expert in intelligent systems, data analysis and computational modelling. His current research considers ensemble learning, automatic knowledge extraction and stochastic modelling of complex phenomena. He had participated in many research projects in a wide range of disciplines, including bioinformatics, neurobiology, remote sensing, audio analysis, agriculture, power engineering and air transport, and developed many novel algorithms and methods.

Sylvie Granon

Ph.D., received doctorate in Neuroscience and postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge. She worked formerly at the Pasteur Institute in Paris before establishing her group in Paris-Sud University, Paris, France, where she is also a Professor of Neurobiology. Working on neurobiology of decision-making, she designed behavioral tasks to target gambling behaviors and social cognition in mice models in order to decipher the role of environmental and developmental factors in these processes. She is particularly interested in finding individual neurobiological markers predicting behavioral performance.