Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences · THU Minds Club · Academic Lecture
Understanding the brain in a changing environment: strategies, methods and results
TIME: 2025-05-08, 13:00-14:30
LOCATION: Lv Dalong Building 1100
SPEAKER: Gunter Schumann
INVITRT: Dan Zhang
Speaker Profile:
Prof. Gunter Schumann MD PhD, Distinguished Professor and Director, Centre for Population Neuroscience and Stratified Medicine (PONS) at ISTBI, Fudan University, Shanghai and Charite University Medicine Berlin is shaping and coordinating European and global mental health research on prediction and neurobiological characterisation of mental disorders. In his research programmes he develops and applies population neuroscience and precision medicine in Europe and globally. Professor Schumann conceived and is coordinating the environMENTAL Horizon Europe project aimed at reducing the impact of major environmental challenges on mental health. He also leads the IMAGEN project, a groundbreaking imaging genetics study of 18 European partners initially funded by the European Commission, the STRATIFY study, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), and the Indian VEDA study. He is a recipient of prestigious awards, including an Advanced Grant of the ERC, a Humboldt Prize of the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as well as several awards of the PR China. He has attracted over 40 million Euro in grant funding and leads the Nature 'Earth, Brain, Health Commission'.
Report Summary:
In this presentation I discuss the Horizon Europe project 'environMENTAL', which is aimed at investigating how some of the greatest global environmental challenges, climate change, urbanisation and regional socioeconomic conditions affect brain health during the lifespan, and develop interventions aimed at prevention and early intervention (www.environmental-project.org). Leveraging federated cohort data of over 1 million European citizens and patients enriched with deep phenotyping data from large scale behavioural neuroimaging cohorts, we are identifying identify brain mechanisms related to environmental adversity underlying symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress and substance abuse.
I will first describe how environMENTAL builds upon our research on quantitative neurobiological phenotypes of psychiatric illness in the IMAGEN (www.imagen-project.org) and other cohorts where we discovered brain mechanisms underlying behaviour and psychopathology, established models for prediction, and stratification of mental illness, and developed novel methods for neuroimaging analyses, including 3T/7T predictions and a digital twin brain model. environMENTAL extends this work by integrating environmental factors, enabling us, for example, to model how complex, real-life exposure to living in the city relates to brain and mental health, and how it is moderated by genetic factors.
Going forward, we shall link population and patient data via geo-location to environmental data derived from remote sensing satellite measures, climate models as well as digital health applications, to develop a neurocognitive model of multimodal environmental influences defined by transdiagnostic symptom groups of mental illness, their brain correlates and their underlying molecular mechanisms.
Based on the mechanistic knowledge generated, the project will identify compounds targeting causal mechanisms of disease and develop in close collaborations with stakeholders virtual reality interventions that target symptom clusters defined by shared brain mechanisms.
