About Viola

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Viola Priesemann is a physicist and neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen. After research projects at the Ecole Normale Superieure Paris (France) and the Caltech (USA), she obtained her PhD at the MPI for Brain Research and the University of Frankfurt. As postdoc and Fellow at the Bernstein Center Göttingen she applied for an independent Max Planck Research Group, which started in 2017 at the MPI in Göttingen. She studies self-organization and learning in living and artificial networks, illuminating the basic mechanisms that shape collective information processing. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she investigated the spread of SARS-CoV-2, quantified the effectiveness of interventions, and derived containment strategies. Viola Priesemann coordinated several position and overview papers on the COVID-19 pandemic and is member of the advisory board of the German government. Her work has been recognized by several awards, including the Communitas Award of the Max-Planck-Society, the “Niedersächsische Wissenschaftspreis” and the Dannie-Heineman-Award. She is member of the Cluster of Excellence “Multiscale Bioimaging”, the Campus Institute for Data Science, the Max Planck - University of Toronto Centre for Neural Science and Technology, and of “Die Junge Akademie”.