Since January 2000, Professor Dr Rainer Goebel is a full professor for Cognitive Neuroscience in the psychology department of Maastricht University. He is the founding director of the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre (M-BIC), which celebrated its opening in spring 2005, and the driving force of the recently established ultra-high field-imaging centre housing 3, 7 and 9.4 Tesla human MRI scanners. He is also team leader of the “Modeling and Neuroimaging” group at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam. In both institutes, he combines functional brain imaging with neural network modelling to advance our understanding of brain function at multiple levels of organization. From 2006, he is the Research Director of the FPN Maastricht Research Institute together with Peter de Weerd and he served the faculty board as head of research and innovation. From 2006-2008 he served as chair of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. He received funding for basic and translational neuroscience research including a prestigious Advanced Investigators Grant from the European Research Council (2011 - 2016) and several grants from the Human Brain Project (2014-2020). He is also founder of the company Brain Innovation BV that produces free and commercial software for neuroimaging data analysis and clinical applications (see brainvoyager.com). In 2014, he has been selected as member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, he has been selected as member of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Science.

This lecture is part of traditional series of lectures for alumni; the UM Star Lectures. The other 13 lectures are organized in 13 different cities and 5 countries on the same day at the same time. This event is organized to reach out to and inspire alumni, share academic insights, experiences and memories and to create an interconnected UM Alumni Community.