Biography

Markus Schirmer, PhD, is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie research fellow as part of the J. Philip Kistler Stroke Research Centre at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, as well as the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn. His current work focuses on bringing advanced methodological approaches in image analysis to clinical population, with which he investigates different outcomes in stroke patients, aiming to understand and utilize the concept that some brains are seemingly more resilient to strokes.

In 2005, Schirmer studied physics at the RWTH Aachen University and received his diploma in 2011. In the last year at the RWTH, he focused on theoretical physics, in particular cosmology, and wrote his thesis on the halo mass function. During my studies he spent a year at Osaka University, working on the Terahertz Color Scanner at the Araki laboratory under supervision of Prof. Yasui and Prof. Aaraki.

From 2012-2015, Schirmer did his PhD at King's College London, as part of the Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering and the Centre for the Developing Brain. He investigated the development of structural connectivity, in particular in premature babies. In order to do so, he utilized network theory, as well as machine learning techniques to allow for group comparisons.