Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre
The Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre (M-BIC) is a research center founded by the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience of Maastricht University. It offers research facilities that were newly established within the Brains Unlimited project, including high (3 Tesla) and ultra-high (7 and 9.4 Tesla) magnetic fields MR scanners. The research core of M-BIC is formed by the Cognitive Neuroscience field, one of the four departments through which the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience conducts its research.
Fast facts
- research in human perception and cognition
- develops advanced methods in neuroscience
- embedded in the Cognitive Neuroscience (CN) department
- eight research units
- research led by Prof. dr. Elia Formisano
- The CN department head is Prof. dr. Peter de Weerd
Research
The research is divided in ten research units, that focus on (and are led by):
- Auditory Perception and Cognition (Lars Riecke)
- Brain and Emotion (Beatrice de Gelder)
- Computational architecture of visual processing streams (Rainer Goebel)
- Brain and Language (Milene Bonte)
- Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Lisa Jonkman)
- Brain Stimulation and Cognition (Alexander Sack) this link will navigate away from the M-BIC webpage
- MR Methods for Neuroscience (Ben Poser)
- Perception, Attention and Learning (Peter de Weerd)
- Methods
- Multiscale Imaging of Brain Connectivity (Alard Roebroeck)
You'll find more information on these research lines here.
Education
M-BIC staff members contribute to teaching in the bachelor's programme in Psychology and Brain Science, as well as the one-year master’s programme in Psychology. They also contribute to the two-year Research Master Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, which is run by FPN, FHML, and SBE.
M-BIC staff teaching in the M-BIC Graduate School
M-BIC staff members also do all the teaching in the M-BIC graduate school. The M-BIC graduate school is set up primarily to teach M-BIC PhD students skills and in-depth background that will facilitate and enrich their research. For M-BIC PhD students, following (part of) these courses is from now on a requirement on the way to the Maastricht University PhD diploma. However, the courses are also open to other PhD students, both from within our own university and from other universities. For more information on offered courses and contact persons, please click here.
Rainer Goebel
“Our brain is a universe, and that universe I want to understand.”
Elia Formisano
“What makes our research innovative is the combination of high-end technology on the MRI side, together with classical psychological research and advanced computational methods.”
Alexander Sack
“By disrupting a certain area of the brain while carrying out a task, like identifying pictures, you can determine whether this region is really necessary in order to perform the task.”
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FPN’s prof. dr. Rainer Goebel has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of € 2,5M for his research project Reading the Mind’s Eye: AI inspired personalised brain models of mental imagery. Goebel is among 255 researchers (out of 1829 applications in all domains) in Europe to receive the grant, and he is...
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Elia Formisano, professor of Neural Signal Analysis at the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience recently published a paper in Nature Neuroscience in collaboration with Bruno Giordano at Université Aix-Marseille, France and Michele Esposito, Giancarlo Valente. The title of the paper is Intermediate...
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Milene Bonte, professor of Cognitive Neuroscience of Language and Literacy Development at UM’s Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, has received an NWO Vici grant of 1.5 million euros. The amount is earmarked for research into the timely identification of children in need of extra support to...
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Last week Dr. Benedikt Poser of the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience (CN) at the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience (FPN) received word from the NWO (Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research) that his team received the NWO Investment Subsidy Medium grant (MaGW) from the NWO’s division of...
