Katrin Amunts
Katrin Amunts is a German neuroscientist, whose three-dimensional Julich-Brain Atlas is replacing classic maps of the brain's microstructure.
She is pioneering the use of supercomputing in neuroscience to better understand the organizational principles of the human brain from the micro to the macro level. She and her colleagues created the BigBrain – a high-resolution anatomical 3D model that became a widely used resource for empirical research as well as modeling and simulation.
Katrin Amunts is a full professor and director of the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute of Brain Research, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Juelich, Germany. From 2016 until 2023 Katrin Amunts was the Scientific Research Director of the EU flagship project “The Human Brain Project” (HBP). Since 2023, she is the Joint Chief Executive Officer of EBRAINS AISBL, Brussels, Belgium, a European research infrastructure that has been developed in the context of the HBP to provide open science tools and data to the research community.
Katrin Amunts is speaker of the Helmholtz Joint Lab Supercomputing and Modelling for the Human Brain, Germany, and co-speaker of the graduate school Max-Planck School of Cognition. Katrin Amunts serves in different boards, e.g., the International Advisory Council Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives, Canada and of the Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine, Italy. In 2016 she became a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering, Acatech, in 2017 of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and in 2023 of the Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences. Katrin Amunts has received awards during her careeer such as the Hector Science Award, the Justine and Yves Sergent Prize as well as the Order of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany.
