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).

Fatima Efendic is from Bosnia and Herzegovina and has been working in the Translational Neurodegeneration Section "Albrecht Kossel" (Prof. Dr. Dr. Hermann/PD Dr. Moritz Frech) since January 2021. Since then, she has been working on her PhD thesis, which focuses on disease modeling of the rare hereditary neurodegenerative disease Fatty Acid Hydroxylase-Associated Neurodegeneration (FAHN). The main goal of her research is to establish patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to study the pathophysiological mechanisms of this fatal disease. As a medical scientist at CTNR, Fatima Efendic will focus on iPCS-derived oligodendrocytes and neurons to study demyelination, which is a major pathophysiological feature of FAHN. For this she will team up with the group of Prof. Dr. Dr. Kipp. It is expected that the results of this project will shed light on the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms of FAHN, which are poorly understood to date.

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.