Dr. Viola Preisemann

Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany

Dr. Viola Priesemann studied physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She then investigated neural information processing at the École normale supérieure in Paris, Caltech in California and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. In 2013, she received her PhD in physics from the University of Frankfurt.
After working as a postdoc with Prof. Dr. Theo Geisel, Dr. Priesemann became a fellow at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Göttingen in 2014 and an independent Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in 2015. She recently accepted an appointment at the University of Göttingen after declining a call to the Department of Physics at the University of Heidelberg in 2020.
Dr. Priesemann has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Lower Saxony Science Prize, the Dannie Heineman Prize of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Arthur-Burkhardt-Award. She is a member of the Cluster of Excellence "Multiscale Bioimaging", the "Junge Akademie" and the COVID-19 Expert Council of the German Federal Government.
Her research focuses on the self-organization of complex networks, especially learning and the emergence of information processing in living neural networks, as well as the dynamics of pandemics and "infodemics" in social networks.