Brains and Bodies in Social Interaction, Learning and Wellbeing

Guillaume Dumas is an Associate Professor of Computational Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Montréal, and the Principal Investigator of the Precision Psychiatry and Social Physiology laboratory at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center. He holds the IVADO professorship for “AI in Mental Health”, and the FRQS J1 in “AI and Digital Health”. In 2023, Dumas was recognized as a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the “Brain, Mind, and Consciousness” program and nominated as a Future Leader in Canadian Brain Research by the Brain Canada Foundation.

Dumas’ research involves Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), cognitive neuroscience, and digital medicine through an interdisciplinary program with two main axes. The first is to foster mental health by creating new algorithms to investigate the development of human cognitive architecture and to deliver personalized medicine in neuropsychiatry using data from genome to smartphones. The second focuses on the interface between social neuroscience and AI/ML, translating basic brain research and dynamical systems formalism into neurocomputational and machine learning hybrid models and machines with social learning ability.

Hyeonjeong Jeong is a Professor at the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies at Tohoku University, Japan. She is also affiliated with the Department of Human Brain Science at the Institute of Development, Aging, and Cancer at Tohoku University. 

Her research primarily focuses on the brain mechanisms involved in language processing and second language (L2) acquisition, utilizing a brain science approach. More specifically, she explores the influence of context, nonverbal factors, and social interaction on language learning. Her work has been featured in reputable journals such as Human Brain Mapping, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Language Learning, Brain and Language, NeuroImage, and Neuropsychologia. She serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Neurolinguistics and is a member of the editorial board for Brain and Language.

Lauri Parkkonen is a Professor at the Aalto University Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering. Parkkonen’s main research area is non-invasive neuroimaging, mainly instrumentation and data analysis methods related to MEG as well as human neuroscience of sensory modalities and cognition. He has contributed to MEG instrumentation and signal processing methods that are currently in active use in over 100 laboratories world-wide. Currently he pursues the use of optically pumped magnetometers for MEG, exploits real-time feedback of measurements of brain activity to study cognition and plasticity, both for basic neuroscientific research and for clinical applications. He is also coordinating a national consortium to develop a biobank for functional brain-imaging data.

Parkkonen has also contributed to ultra-low-field MRI research and to invasive monitoring of local cortical activity. In cognitive neuroscience, Parkkonen has shed light on the neural mechanisms of sensory processing, particularly conscious visual perception. Recently he has pioneered the emerging field of social neuroscience to uncover brain mechanisms supporting social interaction by using hyperscanning i.e. simultaneous recording of the brain activity of the interacting participants.

Professor Satu Palva has led her own research group at the University of Helsinki Neuroscience Center since 2011. In 2018, she was appointed professor at the University of Glasgow Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging. She has been carrying out the vice director’s duties at Neuroscience Center since 2019.

Palva’s research focus is in the area of systems- and cognitive neuroscience, with the goal of understanding the role of oscillations and their interactions in the dynamic emergence of cognitive functions and complex behaviors. Currently, she is specifically interested in visual attention and visual working memory. To this end, a variety of methods are used in her research, including magneto- and electroencephalography (M/EEG) and intracranial EEG (iEEG), as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Machine learning, computational modelling, and whole-brain analyses based on network neuroscience are then used to unravel oscillatory activity of the brain.

Professor Takefumi Kikusui leads a laboratory of Human-Animal Interaction and Reciprocity in Azabu University, Japan. He has studied emotionality of different species, including humans, macaque monkeys, dogs, cats and mice. He has pioneered research on the neuropharmacological basis of social interaction between humans and pet dogs from numerous viewpoints: reciprocal gaze raising oxytocin levels within human-dog bonds, oxytocin contribution to dog tear shedding in reunion with owners, and emotional reactivity reflected within autonomic nervous system of dogs and their owners. He further examines the effect of human-dog bond to human wellbeing.

Wolfgang Tschacher is a Professor of Psychology at the University Hospital of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Bern, Switzerland, and works on quantitative psychotherapy research, art psychology and cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on dynamical systems theory and embodied cognition. He acted as president of the European chapter of the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR). He is member of the board of directors of the Society for Mind-Matter Research and organizer of the series of "Herbstakademie" conferences.

Ivan Zubarev works as a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University. His work centers on the application of machine learning to EEG/MEG for brain-computer interfaces and neuroscience research. Ivan has also developed methods for the analysis of electromagnetic measurements of brain activity. His work in the field of brain-computer interfaces involves paradigm design and implementation. Ivan is also interested in the Bayesian view of the brain during learning.

Dr. Daniel Kluger holds a PhD from the University of Münster, where he also works as a postdoctoral researcher and Junior Principal Investigator. His research interests include brain and bodily rhythms, body-brain interactions, as well as predictive brain processing. Daniel utilizes a number of functional neuroimaging methods – MEG, EEG and fMRI – in their study.

Sonja Koski is a behavioral biologist at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku. She focused on non-human primate behavior and cognition for the first 20 years of her career, studying e.g. social relationships, conflict resolution, personality, and empathy in chimpanzees and marmosets. She obtained her PhD at Utrecht University, moved on to the University of Cambridge and then to the University of Zurich. She obtained the Title of Docent in Biological Anthropology in 2016. In more recent years, she has started a new research phase, zooming in on human-animal relationships from multiple viewpoints. She is interested in how animals interact with people, and how we experience and interpret animals around us. Currently, she is running a project focusing on human-horse interactions, as well as a project on human interpretation on zoo animal emotions.

• Jan Kujala: "Synchrony and causality between neural signals"
• Satu Palva: "Connectomics view on brain dynamics"

• Timo Rantalainen: "Smartphone-enabled mobile physiology assessment – a few ideas"
• Santtu Seipäjärvi & Jan Wikgren: "Inducing and measuring stress in healthy and 'at-risk' populations"
• Zhaodong Sun: "Facial video-based non-contact physiological signal measurement and applications"

• Daniel Kluger: "Respiration-brain coupling in health and disease"
• Ivan Zubarev: TBA

• Lauri Parkkonen: TBA
• Wolfgang Tschacher: "On the many divergent methods to compute synchrony"