Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD
Dr. Pascual-Leone is the Director of the Center for Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston, MA, USA). He holds appointments as Adjunct Professor in Psychiatry and Neurobiology at Boston University, and in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard University, and am also the Associate Director of the Harvard-Thorndike General Clinical Research Center.
His aim is to understand neural plasticity at system's level and seeks to identify rules that are invariant across neural systems and domains. He believe that plasticity is the normally ongoing state of the nervous system and that a coherent account of any neurocognitive theory and neural system has to contemplate plasticity as an integral property of the nervous system and the obligatory consequence of each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or awareness. In this framework, notions such as psychological processes as distinct from organic-based functions or dysfunctions, or of "good" and "bad" plasticity cease to be informative. Plasticity is the reason for development and learning, the cause of disease, and a mechanism of functional recovery. The challenge is to learn enough about the mechanisms of plasticity in order to manipulate them, suppressing some changes and enhancing others, to gain a clinical benefit and behavioral advantage for a given individual.

Invited Speakers:

Marco Congedo, PhD
Dr. Congedo was born in Bari, Italy, in 1972. In 2003 he obtained the Ph.D. degree in Biological Psychology with a minor in Statistics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From 2003 to 2006 he has been a post-doc fellow at the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Control (INRIA) and at France Telecom R&D, in France. Since 2007 Dr. Congedo is a Senior Scientist at the "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS) in the GIPSA Laboratory, Grenoble, France. Dr. Congedo has been the recipient of several awards, scholarships and research grants. He is interested in basic human electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), real-time neuroimaging (neurofeedback and brain computer interface) and multivariate statistical tools useful for EEG and MEG such as inverse solutions and blind source separation. Dr. Congedo is a Fellow of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research and a Consulting Editor for the Journal of Neurotherapy. 

Dirk DeRidder, MD, PhD
Dirk De Ridder is a neurosurgeon, working in Antwerp, Belgium, whose research is focused on the pathophysiology and treatment of phantom perceptions. He developed the technique of electrical auditory cortex stimulation for tinnitus and somatosensory cortex stimulation for pain. Recently also implants were performed for auditory hallucinations.

Felipe Fregni, MD, PhD
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): putative mechanisms of action and clinical effects of a simple and powerful method of cortical electrical stimulation
Dr. Fregni has been the Director of Clinical Trials Network at The Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation since March, 2003. He is also Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. His interests lie in the study of methods of non-invasive brain stimulation such as repetitive magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Mark P. Jensen, PhD
Dr. Jensen's clinical interests include the management of chronic pain, hypnosis for symptom management, skills training (cognitive restructuring, relaxation), and motivational interviewing. Dr. Jensen's research interests include the psychosocial factors of chronic pain adjustment, coping with chronic pain, the effect of hypnosis on chronic pain, the assessment of pain, and pain in persons with disabilities. He is the Chair of the Internal Research Review Committee and the Head of Research and Development for the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine.
Dr. Jensen earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology at Macalester College, his Master's degree in Clinical Psychology at Arizona State University, his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Arizona State University, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington.

Juri Kropotov
Mr. Kropotov graduated from the department of physics (major in quantum mechanics) of St.-Petersburg State University in 1972. In 1975 he defended his PhD theses on "Slow processes in the human brain" at the Institute for Experimental Medicine. In 1985 for his research in the field of human physiology he was awarded the State Prize of the USSR – the highest award in the former Soviet Union . He was the first to show that the basal ganglia thalamo-cortical circuits of the human brain are involved in cognitive and affective functions.  In 1986-1992 he developed a mathematical model of the cortex – the canonical cortical module – that was able to explain most of the properties of neurons in the visual cortex. In 1990s he started the research in the field of quantitative EEG and evoked potentials in normal subjects, in ADHD population and in neurological patients to whom intracranial electrodes were implanted for diagnosis and therapy. In 1998 he began using neurofeedback and transcranial Direct Current Stimulation for treatment ADHD and some other brain dysfunctions. He is now Director of laboratory for neurobiology of action programming at Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St.-Petersburg , Russia and Professor II at the Institute of Psychology at Norwegian University for Science and Technology in Trondhem , Norway . For his research he was awarded the Medal of Honor of Russian Federation, the Diploma of the USSR Academy of Sciences for the Highest Achievement (Discovery) in science. He published more than 180 papers and 7 books.  For many years he served as an editor of the journal "Human Physiology" of Russian Academy of Sciences. He is ex-president of the European Chapter of ISNR and an editor of the "Journal of Neurotherapy."

J. Peter Rosenfeld, PhD
Dr. Rosenfeld is Professor at Northwestern University School of Brain, Behavior and Cognition Psychology. His lab has focused in the past ten years exclusively on mechanisms, classification, and detection of deception, malingering, and false memory. The principal method used to study the deception phenomenon is the P300 Event Related Potential of the EEG, though they have recently collaborated with labs in Belgium and at Harvard to utilize and compare imaging ERP and (fMRI) data. In 2004, they demonstrated that the classic P300 test for concealed information which our lab first published in 1987, was as vulnerable to countermeasures as were older polygraphs. This finding and our government funding agencies, after the events of 9/11, pushed them to develop two novel protocols. The first involved subliminal presentation of key stimuli: If you don't know the stimulus is presented, you cannot counter it. This method is 80-85% accurate but totally impossible to counter. They are currently more focused on their "Complex Trial Protocol." This is a completely novel, P300-based protocol for detection of concealed information. It is 92-100% accurate with or without mental or physical countermeasures. It has been used in both malingering and forensic situations, and has most recently been applied to an anti-terrorist scenario in which the experimenter does not know in advance what the details of the future crime are.

Paul Sauseng, PhD
Mr. Sauseng is a APART (Austrain Program for Advanced Research and Technology) fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the University of Salzburg, Austria and the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany where he is working on projects on brain oscillatory correlates of working memory and using the methods of (combined) EEG and TMS.
Previously, he was a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, Department of Medical Psychology  under Prof. Birbaum and University of Salzburg, Austria, Department of Psychology under Prof. Klimesch. At the Department of Neurology, University of Tuebingen he performed a TMS experiment towards motor reorganization after stroke in Dr. Gerloff's laboratory. He was an assistant lecturer at the University of Salzburg teaching seminars in 'Empirical Seminar in Biopsychology' and 'Magnetic stimulation of the brain - Application in Psychophysiology').

ISNR 2010!  September 30-October 3, 2010 Preconference workshops Sept 27-29 Omni Interlocken Resort near Denver Colorado

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