[FieldTrip] Several positions for PhD students

[Gross, Joachim]

Dear all,

At the Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignal Analysis we have several positions open for PhD students in the labs of Joachim Gross and Markus Junghöfer.
Starting date is October 2024 or after and end date is 30.6.2028. Positions are part of a large collaborative research project on the topic of 'trajectories of affective disorders' funded by the DFG with 14M€ for 4 years with possible extensions.  Please find a summary below. Projects will include MEG/EEG, sleep EEG recordings, TMS, wearable sensors etc with a focus on longitudinal observations in depression.
Positions will be advertised shortly. But if you are interested feel free to contact Joachim Gross (Joachim.gross at uni-muenster.de)

Best
Joachim



Summary of collaborative project:
Affective disorders (AD) are a major global factor in disability and lost life years, comprising major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD). In addition to the acute symptoms during an episode, it is the course of illness over several years that affects individual suffering, psychosocial functioning, and socio-economic burden. While there is increasing knowledge with respect to risk factors for the onset of AD and neurobiological processes during episodes, there is still a profound lack of understanding about mechanisms and modulating factors involved in long-term disease trajectories, recurrences and remissions, chronicity, and functional decline. A better understanding of these factors and mechanisms will be crucial for improving the treatment of AD.

The goals of our research initiative are to identify trajectories of recurrences and remissions in AD, to determine cognitive-emotional mechanisms and neurobiological correlates of acute symptom changes, and to probe mechanism- based interventions. These goals will be achieved by using a threefold approach: (i) we will apply continuous mobile assessment in a prospective cohort, combining in-depth clinical characterization of individual courses of illness with multilevel neuroimaging, biobanking, and -omics analyses in n=1,500 AD patients and healthy subjects over a two- year follow-up with multiple assessments. The participants of this new, joint cohort will stem from the existing DFG FOR 2107 and BMBF Early-BipoLife cohorts with their wealth of available data (Domain A); (ii) we will identify key cognitive-emotional mechanisms (emotion regulation, expectation, social cognition, cognitive-behavioural rhythms) and their neurobiological correlates that mediate the effects of stressors on symptom changes in parallelized human studies and animal experiments (tandem projects; Domain B); and (iii) we will apply interventions that specifically probe the key cognitive-emotional mechanisms regarding their associations with recurrences and remissions in AD (Domain C).

The innovative potential of our proposal is based on three recent developments: (i) advances in mobile assessment will enable us to detect changes in affective symptoms in real time, triggering assessments of cognitive-emotional mechanisms and environmental stressors as episodes fully unfold; (ii) developments in the modelling of complex, dynamic systems and machine learning (ML) approaches allow the integration of human and animal data regarding cognitive-emotional mechanisms (emotion regulation, expectation, social cognition, cognitive-behavioural rhythms) and their interaction with stressors and modifying factors across time, which will help in ultimately predicting symptom changes and course of illness in AD patients; (iii) based on the mechanisms and individual risk profiles, we will apply novel idiographic intervention approaches that target processes underlying effective psychological treatments.

On the solid basis of long-term collaborations of many principal investigators, we will capitalize on these innovative potentials in a Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio (CRC/TRR 393) to elucidate, in a 12-year perspective: (i) environmental, psychosocial, and (neuro)biological factors that predict the course of illness in AD; (ii) cognitive- emotional and neuro-behavioural mechanisms that underlie the cycle of recurrences and remissions in real life; and (iii) targeted, mechanism-based interventions.

In particular, we will focus in a second funding period on the prediction of the individual course of illness in the CRC/TRR 393 cohort participants in real life, using medical device law-approved frameworks and ML. Results from the animal models will be used to integrate novel variables into our cohort measures and to increase mechanism- informed predictability. Disorders will be expanded to co-morbidities, particularly anxiety disorders, to achieve generalizability across disorder categories. In the third funding period, we will employ predictive models to target mechanism-based personalized interventions during critical time windows of symptom change in subgroups of patients, ultimately preventing new episodes.
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