Speakers

 

Prof. Melanie Stefan’s research interests revolve around using computers to understand learning and memory, from simulating how proteins in the brain work together to strengthen the connection between neurons to using educational data to understand how students learn. Melanie Stefan did her pre- and postdoctoral work with Nicolas Le Novère at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge (UK). During that time, she also spent six months as a visiting fellow in Shinya Kuroda's lab at the University of Tokyo. She obtained her PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and Clare College, Cambridge in 2009. After that, she worked as a postdoc in neuroscience with Mary B.Kennedy at the California Institute of Technology (2010-2013), and then as a lecturer and curriculum fellow for quantitative biology at Harvard Medical School (2013-2014). From 2015 to 2022, she was an Edinburgh-Zhejiang lecturer (from 2020: senior lecturer), running a research lab in Edinburgh and co-developing Edinbrugh-Zhejiang joint degree programmes in Biomedical Sciences and Biomedical Informatics in Haining, China. She recently joined Medical School Berlin as a full professor in 2022. In her spare time, Melanie advocates for an open discussion about failure in science.

 

Dr. Karlijn Massar is Associate Professor at the department of Work & Social Psychology, Maastricht University. She is involved in (inter)national projects that focus on explaining and reducing socioeconomic health differences, with a specific focus on protective, agency-enhancing factors. In 2020, she received a grant from the D&I office to study the antecedents and consequences of Impostor Syndrome among PhD students of the UM.