Prof. Dr. med. Rebekka LencerPrincipal Investigator Phone: +49 251 83 52581
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Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet MuensterDepartment of Psychiatry and Psychotherapie University Hospital Albert Schweitzer Campus A1, Geb. A9 48149 Muenster Germany |
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Marian Surmann, M.Sc.Study Coordinator Phone: + 49251836601
Prof. Georg RömerPhone: +49 2518356250
Olga BienekPhone +492518356250 |
Prof. Dr. med. Dr. Phil. Dipl-Psych
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The Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU) is Germany's third largest university (www.uni-muenster.de/en/). Münster University Hospital (UMUENS) forms part of the WWU. The Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at UMUENS provides 115 inpatient beds and a large out-patient unit. The Department has outstanding expertise in research on psychotic disorders including collaborative national and international research projects, e.g. EU-funded “Schiz-DX” and “mPIVAS”. Prof. Lencer is the PRONIA site coordinator at UMUENS. She is the head of the section for patients with psychotic disorders offering specialized multidimentional diagnostic and treatment programs including early detection and treatment. She is also the speaker of the interdisciplinary Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience at WWU(www.unimuenster.de/OCCMuenster/members/rebekka-lencer.html).
She is an expert on basic and applied research on cognition and sensorimotor transformation both in healthy individuals and patients with serious mental disorders. Her work is translational in nature, applying methodologies and findings from nonhuman primate work into the clinical setting aiming at enhancing the understanding of both the pathophysiology of serious neuropsychiatric disorders and also the genetics of these disorders. Specifically, she uses novel neurophysiological methods (eye movement paradigms) in the imaging environment to correlate quantitative behavioral data with the associated neuronal brain activity including family studies. She is involved in large longitudinal follow-up studies including pre/posttreatment fMRI studies of cognitive control in first-episode antipsychotic-naïve schizophrenia and psychotic bipolar patients led by Prof. Sweeney, University of Texas Southwestern, USA.
Further, Prof. Lencer is a collaborator in the ongoing large, NIMH-funded, Bipolar Schizophrenia Network on Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) study being responsible for the multivariate analyses of eye movement measures collected in N=5000 patients, 1°-relatives and healthy controls.
Prof. Dannlowski, head of the section translational psychiatry and co-speaker of the DFG funded FOR2107 (www.for2107.de), has a tight collaboration with Prof. Lencer supporting the PRONIA project. He is the coordinator of neuroimaging studies in the department, has long-standing expertise in large-scale, multi-center neuroimaging studies (e.g., within the SFB-TRR 58 or BMBF-PROTECT-AD) and has formed strong collaborations with Prof. Koutsouleris regarding machine learning techniques in neuroimaging research. His work focusses multivariate prediction of diagnostic categories or treatment outcome based on neuroimaging and clinical parameters. Further, PRONIA recruitment is supported by Prof. Romer and his team, director of the Department of Child-and Adolescence Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at UMUENS.