In 2017, Janine Petters started working on her PhD project in the research group of Dr. Jan Lukas at the Albrecht-Kossel-Institute (since 2019 Translational Neurodegeneration Section “Albrecht Kossel”). She was part of the Landesexzellenzinitiative Mecklenburg-Vorpommern project funded by the European Union (ESF, grant no.: ESF/14-BM-A55-0046/16) ”Protein misfolding, ER-stress and protein degradation - Development of a systematic pipeline for individualized therapies of hereditary disorders of the liver and pancreas, PePPP”. Her research deals with the development and characterization of a patient-specific iPSC-derived cell model system for the copper storage disorder Wilson disease which mainly affects the liver and brain. As a CTNR Medical Scientist, Janine Petters tries to find potential drug candidates and aims to test these substances in her differentiated iPSC-derived liver cell model in order to correct the dysfunctional copper transporter ATP7B in iPSC-derived hepatocytes from Wilson disease patients.

After successfully completing her studies, Luisa Müller started a position as research associate and PhD student in the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy. She is currently working in the EXCITE project on preclinical research in Alzheimer´s disease rodent models and already conducted several experiments on BL6J and APPswe/PS1dE9 mice to unravel the complex relationship between sleep-wake-rhythms and brain clearance. She established the method of intrahippocampal stereotactic injections in the working group. To investigate the influence of sleep-wake-rhythms on brain clearance a fluorescent dye was injected into the hippocampi of mice (wildtype and transgenic) at different times of the day (begin or end of the sleep period of the mice). At defined time points after injection brains were explanted and tissue dispersion of the dye was assessed histologically. An abstract of this work was handed in to AAIC®2021 for presentation. As a CTNR Medical Scientist, Luisa Müller will establish an approach investigating neuronal hyperexcitability in Alzheimer’s disease combining in vivo multimodal imaging and EEG recordings.

Since 2015, Dr. Kersten is a resident at the Department of Neurology and member of a clinical research group for movement disorders and deep brain stimulation. As a Neuro Clinician Scientist, Dr. Kersten will work on "Functional characterization of the basal ganglia-cortex network to improve individual clinical efficacy of deep brain stimulation in movement disorders".

The clinical mentor of Dr. Kersten is Prof. Dr. med. Alexander Storch (Department of Neurology) and the scientific mentor is Prof. Dr. med. Rüdiger Köhling (Oscar-Langendorff- Institute of Physiology).

Since 2018, Dr. Streckenbach is a resident at the Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Pediatric Radiology and Neuroradiology at the University Medical Center Rostock and member of the clinical research group in Neuroradiology. As a Neuro Clinician Scientist, Dr. Streckenbach will work on the “development of a biodegradable stent for intracranial aneurysms”.

The clinical mentor of Dr. Streckenbach is Prof. Dr. med. Marc-André Weber (Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Pediatric Radiology and Neuroradiology) and the scientific mentors are Prof. Dr.-Ing. Nils Grabow and Prof. Dr.-Ing Klaus-Peter Schmitz (Institute for Biomedical Engineering).