Address
University College London
90 High Holborn
1st Floor, room 1.21
London, WC1V 6LJ
Phone +44 20 3549 5631
eMail a.altmann@ucl.ac.uk

Short Bio

I studied Computer Science at the RWTH Aachen and graduated in 2005 with a work in the field of spoken language recognition at the Chair for Computer Science 6. After that I pursued my PhD studies in Saarbrücken at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in the Computational Biology group of Thomas Lengauer. From February 2010 till May 2012 I was a Postdoctoral researcher in the Statistical Genetics Group headed by Bertram Müller-Myhsok at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. From July 2012 till July 2015 I worked at the FIND lab of the Stanford University headed by Michael D Greicius first as a Postdoctoral Scholar (till January 2015) and later as an Instructor. In August 2015 I joined UCL as a MRC Senior Fellow (with support from the MRC eMedLab project), where I launched the COMputational Biology in Imaging and geNEtics (COMBINE) lab as part of the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC).

Research Interests

My research focuses on understanding how molecular biology shapes brain function in healthy and diseased brains. In the healthy brain I aim at answering questions such as “Which genes are responsible for variations in neural activity in the resting brain?” whereas in the diseased brain I want to understand which processes are causing severe malfunctions leading to neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders such as Major Depressive Disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. My goal is to understand the molecular biology behind these disorders; down the road such an understanding may result in new drug candidates. Furthermore, I am interested in developing disease biomarkers that assist in early detection of the disorder and in personalizing the treatment. Thus, my research interests are centered on topics in neuroimaging, molecular genetics, and machine learning (and their combinations).

Selected Recent Publications

Click here for the full list of publications.