My new home: the famous Burghölzli in Zurich. Founded in the 19th century and with famous residents such as Jung, Bleuler, and Rorschach, the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zürich is now a modern facility in a very scenic environment. More than this, it is also a great place to do progressive research. I am working now as a PostDoc in Frank Scharnowski‘s newly founded research group. Our main focus will be real-time fMRI neurofeedback and supporting our partners from the clinical research groups with methodological expertise, such as optimized data pre-processing strategies, resting state functional connectivity, and DCM. I already had time to meet my lovely colleagues and to set up my espresso machine. Oh, and did I mention the scenic environment?

Yesterday, just in time before we are moving to Zurich, I received my habilitation at the Medical University of Vienna in Medical Physics. The toughest part was probably to blitz through 6 years of research in a ten-minute presentation. I hope I did mention all collaborators and funding sources… Anyway, I was so happy that my family, friends, and colleagues were all there to support me. After the party I truly enjoyed my rehabilitation holiday in Spain, together with Katja and Lea.

Great news! Martin Tik, Lucia Navarro, and I have each been selected to receive a Merit Abstract Award for the 2015 OHBM Annual Meeting in Honolulu (Hawaii, USA). After a double-blind peer-review process, only the top-rated abstracts were selected for this competitive award. Martin Tik will present his work on ultra-high field functional MR imaging of the human brain during an Aha!-moment as a poster. Lucia Navarro will give an oral presentation on the benefits of her newly-developed MRI acquisition coil in combination with transcranial magnetic stimulation. My effective connectivity study on emotion processing in the extended amygdala network shall be also presented in one of the few oral presentation slots. Aloha!

Last night I participated in a science slam. Unlike traditional academic talks, they want you to present your research without any slides and figures – which is kind of haaard if you do neuroimaging. However, I got a bit creative and won the audience vote with my talk Ins Hirn einischaun (Lookin’ into the brain). To my big surprise the Austrian Minister for Science, Dr. Karl-Heinz Töchterle, was also in the audience.

This way to the video of my 7-minute talk: Vimeo, YouTube