About us

Organisation

Neurobiology Research Unit (NRU) at Rigshospitalet has been the coordinating partner in the Center and the national partners have included the pharmaceutical company H. Lundbeck A/S and four academic partners: one from the University of Copenhagen and three from university hospitals in the Capital Region of Denmark. International partners included Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard and the UK-based enterprise Imanova Ltd (acquired by Invicro LLC in August 2017). Additionally, Imperial College London has been involved in NeuroPharm as affiliated partner.

As illustrated in the organizational diagram below, the Center Director, Gitte Moos Knudsen, assisted by the full-time Center Manager, Peter Steen Jensen, has had the overall responsibility for meeting the milestones within NeuroPharm, including the financial and reporting responsibility.

The Center Director has been chair of the Center Steering Group which has had the function of reviewing the overall progress of the Center and discuss new strategic initiatives. The main task of the Steering Group was to assist and provide consultancy to the Director, for example in relation to major changes in the projects, meeting arrangements, and involvement of external experts.

Day-to-day basis operation of the Center was taken care of by a Council of Investigators (CoI) Group consisting of the younger work package leaders with the daily responsibility for the different NeuroPharm projects. The CoI group has been in charge of monitoring and discussing research progress in all projects by mutually informing about individual project status and discussing practical and scientific aspects.

Steering Group

The main task of the NeuroPharm Steering Group is to assist and provide consultancy to the Center Director, for example in relation to major changes in the projects, meeting arrangements, and involvement of external experts. The members of NeuroPharm's steering group are:

	Center Director: Prof. Gitte Moos Knudsen Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet and University of Copenhagen Prof. Knudsen is a translational neurobiologist and clinical neurologist and is internationally renowned for her seminal contributions to the basic, preclinical and clinical investigations of neurobiological mechanisms underlying brain disorders such as affective and neurodegenerative disorders. She has extensive scientific leadership experience from 10 years of independent research leadership at the Neuroscience Center at Rigshospitalet, and as a professor of Clinical Neurobiology at the University of Copenhagen.
	Prof. Bruce Rosen Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA Prof. Rosen is a highly recognized MR-scientist and a world-leading expert in functional neuroimaging. He is Professor of Radiology at the Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Science and Technology at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
	Prof. David Nutt Imperial College London, UK Prof. Nutt is a clinical psychiatrist and neuropharmacologist. He is currently the Edmond J Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology and director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London.
	Associate Prof. Esben Budtz-Jørgensen Department of Biostatistics, University of Copenhagen Dr. Budtz-Jørgensen is a biostatistician with a considerable experience in statistical analysis of complex multivariate data. One of his main research topics has been how to use structural equation models in the field of environmental epidemiology, and he has also done research on methods for model selection and modelling of genetic and imaging data.
	Prof. Jens D. Mikkelsen Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet and University of Copenhagen Prof. Mikkelsen is a translational neuropharmacologist with more than 10 years of experience from drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry.
	Eugenii (Ilan) Rabiner Imanova Ltd., London, UK Dr. Rabiner is Head of Imaging Applications and CMO of Imanova Ltd., which is a private British-based company that specialises in cutting edge imaging support for Pharma and academia. Dr. Rabiner is a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist with almost 20 years experience in the development of novel molecular imaging methods and their application to experimental medicine and novel drug development.
	Birgitte Søgaard H. Lundbeck A/S, Valby, DK Dr. Søgaard is Divisional Director for Clinical and Quantitative Pharmacology and Head of department in Clinical Pharmacology including Clinical Pharmacology Operations at H. Lundbeck A/S. She has worked with clinical pharmacology for 25 years with focus on the establishment of biological models to be able to quantify and describe biological responses to support drug development.
	Prof. Sven Frøkjær Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen Prof. Frøkjær is a drug formulation scientist with significant experience from both academia and the pharmaceutical industry.
	Center Manager: Peter Steen Jensen Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet

Council of Investigators

The main task of the NeuroPharm Council of Investigators (COI) group is to coordinate the daily operation of the different NeuroPharm projects in the four work packages. This includes monitoring and discussing research progress and mutually informing about individual project status and discussing practical and scientific aspects of mutual interest. The members of NeuroPharm's COI group are:

	NP1 leader: Vibe G. Frøkjør Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet and Psychiatric Centre Copenhagen Vibe G. Frøkjær is a medical doctor with clinical experience in neurology and psychiatry. The last decade she has been involved in brain research based at Neurobiology Research Unit. Her research line aims at uncovering neurobiological correlates to vulnerability for developing neuropsychiatric disease, which ideally hold a preventive potential. She works primarily with molecular imaging of serotonergic neurotransmission in the context of steroid hormone biology, and genetic and personality risk factors for neuropsychiatric disease.
	NP2 leader: Patrick Fisher Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet Patrick Fisher holds a PhD in Neuroscience from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh (US) and is assisting professor with special focus on multimodal brain imaging. He has been involved in brain research at Neurobiology Research Unit since 2011 and his research focuses on identifying molecular mechanisms that shape inter-individual variability in behaviorally relevant brain function and related risk for psychopathology through multi-modal human neuroimaging, imaging genetics and intervention strategies.
	NP3 leader: Hanne D. Hansen Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet Hanne D. Hansen has a PhD in experimental neuroimaging with special focus on radiotracer evaluation, PET data analysis, and simultaneous PET-MR imaging. During her PhD studies she spent time at the A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Boston, where she carried out a preclinical project in non-human primates. The results of these studies have laid the foundation for one of the projects in NP3, namely a clinical PET-MR project studying the 5-HT1B receptor and the effects of giving pharmacological interventions.
	NP4 leader: Brice Ozenne Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet and Section of Biostatistics, University of Copenhagen Brice Ozenne is a biostatistician with a PhD from University Lyon 1 (France). He is interested in the development of Latent Variable Models for complex data, predictive models and dimension reduction methods and he is applying these methods on neuroscience data to investigate the relationship between the brain response and depression. In 2017 he was awarded one of the competitive Marie-Curie fellowships.