Valentin Riedl ­­­­

Brain Scientist, and making films about science

Bergkirchweih Erlangen

June 2025: What the Oktoberfest is for Munich is the Bergkirchweih for Erlangen... the best opportunity to bounce your lab leader's car as hard as you want.

 

Laura at OHBM

June 2025:  Laura got invited to give a talk at OHBM 2025 about her transcriptomics-imaging work , congrats!


food tasting

May 2025: important lab routine involves continuous food checks, this time: vegan ice-cream from the GELATO LAB colleagues (with tough grading by our Italian members) and vegan Weißwurst (doable, but...). 

lab retreat

Mar 2025: We had a fabulous lab retreat together with the MR-physics neighbors (Jana Hutter's team) in our shared new lab space ... bridging fetal and brain imaging!


over and out 2024

Dec 2024: Unfortunately, the final final christmas party with a few of you... you'll gonna be missed, André & Toni!

 

mountain retreat 2024

Aug 2024: Highlight of the year! Despite some rainy mountains this year, our spot definitely makes up for it with decent food (not shown) and adrenergic adventures


MRI labs retreat @FAU

June 2024: First time that we presented our group's work at my new hosting institution, Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) in Erlangen. So many MR physicists and 3T/7T-MRI scanners around, you don't really know which fancy project to start first .-) 

...waiting

Mar 2024: waiting for pizza is definitely more fun than waiting for the seminar room to be available.

 

Funding for EBRAINS 2.0

Jan 2024: We will contribute to the EBRAINS platform (European Brain Research Infrastructures) which has received €38 million by the European Commission for the EBRAINS 2.0 funding period (2024-26). 

EBRAINS develops tools and services to widely serve research communities in neurosciences, brain medicine, and brain-inspired technologies. It is an open research infrastructure that offers an extensive range of brain data sets, a multilevel brain atlas, modelling and simulation tools, and access to high-performance computing resources and robotics and neuromorphic platforms to researchers.

The project involves 59 partner institutions from 16 European countries. The lab of Valentin, together with colleagues from Vienna, Copenhagen, and Padua will contribute multimodal (PET/MRI/EEG) imaging data of the human brain. 



2023 over and out


 

Where does all the glucose go in the brain?

Dec 2023: Science Advances published our study on the energetic costs of signaling throughout the connectome of the human brain.

The paper, entitled An Energy-Costly Architecture of Neuromodulators for Human Brain Evolution and Cognition, gained some traction in social and press media:

Altmetric Attention Score (Dec 22th) 



Spreading our lab's work at conferences

Nov 2023: Throughout this year,  the lab was present at different venues with highly interdisciplinary topics

  • Invited talk for Roman Belenya: Metabolic Connectivity Mapping across the entire human brain
    (OHBM, Canada) 
  • Invited talk for André Hechler: The energetic footprint of predictive processing in the human brain
    (TeaP Conference of Experimental Psychologists, Germany) 
  • Antonia Bose: Quantifying Cerebral Energy Metabolism Under Varying Levels of Systemic Glucose Availability
    (OHBM, Canada)
  • Laura Fraticelli: Neuroenergetic Gene Networks in the Human Brain
    (IBRO, Spain)
  • Katarzyna Kurcyus: fMRS Symposium
    (Bangor, UK)

Roman in the "BIG" auditorium at OHBM


PhD awarded to Samira

Sept 2023: Awesome defense by Samira Epp!  Luckily she will extend her exceptional knowledge on quantitative PET- and MR imaging with an exploration of high-field MRI during a PostDoc period in my lab at FAU.


Another fabulous lab retreat in the mountains

Aug 2023: hike-n-work, but the best is still the chocolate dumplings in the evening from Seppi!

Matching clothes for birthdays

Feb 2023: one of the better examples of "twinning clothes", happy birthday Toni!

 

Valentin joins Silbersalz Institute to create new science-art

Feb 2023: Valentin was invited to take part in the Silbersalz Institute, 2023 edition, a new initiative funded by the European Union to bring artists and scientists together with the idea to broaden the public perception of science. The year-long program includes Masterclass trainings with renowned mentors from the film, immersive VR, and arts sections. 

 


New position, fancy MR-scanner: Full Professorship for Valentin

Jan 2023: Valentin will start a new lab at Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) in Erlangen-Nuernberg. He took the position of Full Professor for Neuroimaging of metabolic and immunological processes and will implement quantitative and metabolic brain imaging at ultra-high field MRI (7T). The official ceremony was followed by a great surprise from the lab with a proper graduation cap and pictures from all recent adventures into nature and decent food!

https://www.neuroradiologie.uk-erlangen.de/kontakt/visitenkarte/valentin-riedl-12158/


Film screening at Psychoanalytics Film Festival

Oct 2022: My award-winning film LOST IN FACE on the live of faceblind Carlotta is still running in cinemas. This time, we screened at the Psychoanalytics days in Lübeck, Germany, and at the European Psychoanalytics Film Festival in London, UK, followed each time by a great discussion with fellow researchers and clinicians.

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