Congratulations to our Researcher of the Month: Stephan Heunis of the Psychoinformatics Lab, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Brain & Behaviour (INM-7), Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany and SYNC Lab, Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Stephan is replacing Cyril Pernet as the Vice-Leader of WG2.
Stephan has a background in Biomedical Engineering and Robotics from Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He worked as a commercial and software engineer for four years in two industries (Industrial Automation and Enterprise Mobility) before moving to the Netherlands with the goal of conducting research in neuroscience. His doctoral research at the Eindhoven University of Technology focused on developing new acquisition and signal processing methods for functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that allow improved tracking and visualization of brain activity in real-time.
Stephan is passionate about brains, accessible education, and making scientific practice more transparent and inclusive. Throughout his doctoral research, he has been active in the Dutch network of Open Science Communities, the OHBM Open Science Special Interest Group, and he founded OpenMR Benelux, a community working on wider adoption of open science practices in MRI research through talks, discussions, workshops and hackathons.
Currently, Stephan continues this passion as a Research Data and Software Engineer at INM-7 in the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, where he works as part of the Psychoinformatics lab on software solutions for decentralized research data management. He also holds a post-doctoral position in the SYNC developmental neuroscience lab at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
