Consortium Partners

Role in the project

Charité is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe. All of its clinical care, research and teaching is delivered by physicians and researchers of the highest international standard. The Centre for Population Neuroscience and Stratified Medicine (PONS) aims at establishing and analysing big neuroimaging genetic datasets to precisely identify brain mechanisms underlying behaviour, and their genetic and environmental mediators, thus enabling prediction and stratification of mental disorders. The environMENTAL project is coordinated by Prof. Gunter Schumann, a pioneer in the field of population neuroscience. His team will carry out the spatiotemporal environmental characterisation and together with Henrik Walter, be involved in the biomarker identification.
Prof. Markus Ralser will add to the multi-model -omics characterisation using a unique proteomics platform developed by his group that enables ultra-high-throughput serum and plasma proteomics according to clinical laboratory standards. Shared data analysis will be enabled by the establishment of a data(base) infrastructure and management following FAIR principles, led by Prof. Roland Eils  and Sven Twardziok (BIH).

Role in the project

Freie Universitaet Berlin is a full-spectrum university, comprising twelve departments and three Central Institutes that together offer more than 150 different academic programs in a broad range of disciplines. Three times, it successfully performed the German government’s Excellence competition for universities. The main focus of the Institute of Meteorology’s research and teaching is on the understanding of atmospheric processes and the simulation of weather and climate. Within the project, Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schepanski, professor of radiation and remote sensing of atmospheres and her team will support the development of the spatio-temporal environmental analyses tool with her expertise in atmospheric and aerosol science.

Key publications:

Tegen, I. and K. Schepanski (2018), Climate Feedback on Aerosol Emission and Atmospheric Concentrations, Current Climate Change Reports, 4(1), 1-10, doi:10.1007/s40641-018-0086-1

Bartkowski, B., K. Schepanski, S. Bredenbeck, and B. Müller (2022), Wind erosion in European agricultural landscapes: more than physics, People and Nature, https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10418.

Schepanski, K. (2018), Transport of Mineral Dust and Its Impact on Climate, Geosciences, 8(5), 151, doi:10.3390/geosciences8050151.

Role in the project

​The Central Institute for Mental Health (CIMH) is one of the most renowned research facilities nationally and internationally for psychiatric disorders and clinical neuroscience. Its research focuses i.a. on disorder-specific and transdiagnostic mechanisms of risk, resilience and course of common child psychiatric disorders like ADHD, ASD and associated disorders, on translating findings into innovative prevention and age-adapted, personalized, biomarker-based, staged pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatment programmes and guidelines, and on clinical studies to assess the long-term efficacy and safety of pediatric psycho­pharmaco­therapy. Under the lead of Prof. Tobias Banaschewski and Prof. Meyer-Lindenberg, CIMH will enable the clinical translation of the environMENTAL findings and support the identification of new biomarkers.

Role in the project

The University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH) is one of the largest medical care centers in Europe, guaranteeing research medical-technical care at the highest level. The Institute of Medical Psychology and Medical Sociology has its focus in medical teaching and research. The main scientific areas target behavioral medicine and basic neuropsychobiological research on learning and memory processes and information processing in the brain in the context of psychpathology, pain, and over the life span. A particular interest lies in the question how behavior and experience influence neural processes and how neural processes alter behavior and experience. This information will be used for integration into the development and empirical evaluation of behavioural medicine prevention and rehabilitation programmes using a combination of brain-behavior modulation techniques and digital tools.

Under the lead of Prof. Frauke Nees, director of the Institute of Medical Psychology and Medical Sociology, in environMENTAL, a digital health app will be developed to ascertain a detailed behavioural and psychological assessment in daily life, also mapping environmental circumstances and spots, under the principles of citizen science. This app will be distributed in population-based and clinical cohorts.  

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Role in the project

The University of Oslo is the highest ranked institution of education and research in Norway – and one of the World’s Top 100 universities with a strong track record of pioneering research and scientific discovery. The Norwegian Centre of Excellence, led by Prof. Andreasson is the largest neuropsychiatric research unit in Norway. The Centre runs a large ongoing clinical collaborative programme on neuropsychiatric disorders. It provides unique access to the Norwegian registry data as well as extensive genetic and neuroimaging samples and has a longstanding expertise in harmonising and linking big datasets. Within environMENTAL, the teams around Prof. Andreassen and Prof. Westlye are leading the federating and harmonising of large-scale population-based cohorts.

Role in the project

Since its founding in 1991, the University of Potsdam has excelled in research and teaching and established several international collaborations. The institute of social and preventive medicine, having a central role in environMENTAL, investigates how psychosocial factors influence health and illness across the life span. In addition to socio-demographic context factors such as age, educational background and migration background, the group is interested in how psychological, social and societal resources can maintain and promote health, and which stressors and risk factors affect disease processes and how. With this expertise in social and preventive medicine, the group around Prof. Michael Rapp will contribute to the environMENTAL analyses of how psychosocial factors influence health and illnesses.

Role in the project

Radboud university medical center is a university medical center for patient care, research, and education, located in Nijmegen with the mission to be at the forefront of shaping the health and healthcare of the future. The research group predictive clinical neuroscience, led by Prof. André Marquand at the Donders Institute, a research centre devoted to understanding human cognition and behaviour in health and disease, is focusing on the development of statistical and machine learning techniques to make predictions relevant to brain disorders. With this strong expertise, Prof. Marquand’s group will be responsible for the development of an overall analytic framework of the project as well as statistical methods involving deep learning, normative modelling, and longitudinal and multi-modal analyses and provide the key interface for all environMENTAL data sets.

Role in the project

Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) is a cross-disciplinary research institution that combines basic science research with graduate education. Its scientists perform theoretical and experimental research in Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Information and System Sciences. Prof. Gaia Novarino’s group aims to study genes underlying inherited forms of neurodevelopmental disorders such as epilepsy, intellectual disability, and autism. Within environMENTAL, Prof. Novarino will transfer the multi omic information, to cellular models with CRISPR perturbed signalling pathways to study the effect on cell morphology and neuronal activity in human 3D brain organoids.

Role in the project

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Role in the project

The University Hospital Bonn is highly active in creating a strong network between patient care, science and teaching to reach its mission – the health and wellbeing of patients. It is embedded in an outstanding and innovative research environment of the University of Bonn and cooperating institutions. The Institute of Human Genetics aims to identify the genetic basis for diseases and to develop innovative means for diagnosis and prognosis of disease. Within the project, it will be responsible for the genomic analyses of IMAGEN and STRATIFY cohorts to identify disease related molecular signatures.

Role in the project

LIFE & BRAIN Genomics is one of the leading European service providers for array-based omics analyses. It supports customers from academia, industry and the healthcare sector with innovative products and scientific expertise from project planning to data analysis. Due to its close cooperation with the Institute of Human Genetics in Bonn, LIFE & BRAIN Genomics is in constant communication with the research community and is continually developing new applications for generating and interpreting omics data. Within the project, it will carry out the genotyping and bioinformatic analyses in its genotyping facilities, being one of Europe’s largest high-throughput facilities.

Role in the project

KSILINK is a pioneer in patient-based drug discovery. It designs and applies unique patient-based cellular assays for large-scale phenotyping screens, leaning on the power of AI-driven image analysis. Integrated from bed to bench and back to bed, it aims to generate most efficient first-in-class therapeutic molecules for next generation medicine. Within environMENTAL, KSILINK’s expertise will allow for an accurate determination of phenotypic signatures or ‘neuronal fingerprints’ of a given cellular state in authentic stem cell-derived disease models enabling mechanistic studies to better understand the molecular and cellular disease pathology. This will further lead to the implementation of screening activities aiming for the identification of compounds with potential to reverse a disease-related fingerprint towards a normal profile. Compounds shown to revert the phenotype in the cellular disease model are candidates for further drug discovery and development.

Role in the project

Aix-Marseille University (AMU) is the largest multidisciplinary French-speaking university in France, with high commitment to interdisciplinarity, which is at the heart of its development strategy. Its Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes is a multidisciplinary research institute of Inserm and Aix-Marseille University with the research focus on understanding the complex dynamics of the brain. Within environMENTAL, the group around Prof. Viktor Jirsa will test the causal models of molecular mechanisms, underlying the brain changes related to environmental signatures for their systemic effects. Thereby it will resort to The Virtual Brain, a neuroinformatics platform dedicated to the simulation of large-scale brain networks, part of the Human Brain Project.

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Role in the project

Virtual Bodyworks S.L (VBW) specialises in immersive virtual reality focused on medical and psychological rehabilitation. The primary expertise of VBW is immersive virtual reality, interaction, and evaluation of immersive systems. The company has produced products in the domains of rehabilitation for domestic violence, mental health, and physical rehabilitation.  In EnvironMENTAL project, VBW will contribute with its software and it will be adapted to the particular issue of climate change and form the basis of the development of a therapeutic technique with an automated therapist. The concept is the presupposition that there exists a future self who has overcome personal adversity (poor mental health as a consequence of environmental change).

Role in the project

ARTTIC Innovation GmbH is a spin-off of ARTTIC SAS, which has successfully been managing large-scale research and innovation projects since its foundation in 1987. In close to 33 years of company history, ARTTIC set-up and managed more than 400 projects in EU funding programmes from FP 2 to Horizon Europe. ARTTIC Innovation GmbH builds on this experience and bundles the company’s activities in Germany, which have been built and continuously strengthened since 2006. ARTTIC Innovation manages the environMENTAL project providing the methods, tools and operational support to promote an effective collaboration within the consortium. It will support the consortium in the daily management, administrative and contractual tasks to ensure the project is properly monitored and decisions and actions are prepared and taken according to the project’s progress. ARTTIC Innovation GmbH aims at simplifying the contractual and administrative work requested from the researchers as much as possible. Furthermore, ARTTIC Innovation GmbH supports project communication, dissemination, IPR management and exploitation activities.

Role in the project

The University of Jena is a center of science in Thuringia with a 500 year long tradition. Numerous famous names have passed through its doors over the centuries: Johann Franz Buddäus, Erhard Weigel, Schiller, Goethe, Hegel and Fichte. They were later followed by industrial pioneers Abbe, Zeiss and Schott, who steered the small town of Jena into the modern age. With around 18,000 students and more than 8,600 employees, the University of Jena significantly shapes the character of the city of Jena.  The Institute of Geography was founded in 1992 and developed to one of the most important Geography institutes in the German speaking area.
The group around PD Dr. Sören Hese, an expert in mapping of urban land use structures in multisensory very high-resolution Earth observation data, will develop the spatial environmental variables used to link mental diseases to geo spatial patterns and signatures using multidimensional Earth observation data and derived products (3D build-up properties of urban areas, green neighborhood metrics, terrain height data, multispectral signatures and night time light data).

Role in the project

Fudan is one of the leading universities in Asia. The Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence (ISTBI), is an research institution of Fudan University. ISTBI focuses on the interdisciplinary research among intelligence science, cognitive neuroscience and mental health. Fudan affiliated PONS Shanghai is led by Prof. Gunter Schumann and Dr Tianye Jia. Prof. Schumann is the co-director of the ISTBI Zhangjiang International Brain Bank (ZIB). PONS Shanghai will work closely with other environMENTAL partners to validate research findings from the European cohorts in the ZIB, and to develop virtual brain models that can stimulate environmental adversities on molecular pathway and brain network properties.

Role in the project

King’s College London (King’s) partnership in this project is in line with its vision to deliver research to inform and innovate and make the world a better place. It hosts the Institute of Psychiatry Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), which is one of the world’s strongest mental health research institutions, consistently ranked top in the world for highly cited (top 1%) publications in mental health and neuroscience. It promotes a strong research environment, combining clinical and research expertise, to ensure that research that addresses the most important clinical questions is delivered.

The National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) symbolises this spirit. It is a key partnership between the IoPPN and the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (the largest mental health provider in Europe), and forms part of King’s Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre. It is the only BRC specialising in mental, aiming to accelerate the translation of the latest scientific discoveries into clinical trials and other well-designed studies. By bringing together scientists and clinicians from different disciplines, these findings can be evaluated, developed, and implemented in the National Health Service, providing new tests and treatments for people with mental health conditions and neurological disorders.

Sylvane Desrivières, Professor of Biological Psychiatry and deputy lead of the King’s BRC ‘Eating disorders & obesity’ Theme, leads the multi-omics analyses in environMENTAL (Work Package 5), with the aim to identify and characterise genomic and molecular signatures related to brain, behaviour and environment. She is also a co-investigator on the development and implementation of digital health assessments aspect of the project (Work Package 3). In addition to leading projects exploring biopsychosocial risk factors for eating disorders (ESTRA study; PI), she leads several international neuroimaging x genomics consortia, including IMAGEN and STRATIFY (UK-PI), part of environMENTAL. She also Chairs the Epigenetics Working Group of the international Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis consortium (ENIGMA). She applies her skills and knowledge in neurobiology, genomics, magnetic resonance imaging and clinical and population neuroscience to discover the aetiological roots of major mental illnesses.

Role in the project

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Role in the project

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Role in the project

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Role in the project

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