Viola Priesemann

Viola Priesemann is a Professor of Physics at the University of Göttingen and heads the Max Planck Research Group on the Theory of Neural Systems at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen. She also holds affiliations with the Cluster of Excellence 'Multiscale Bioimaging', the Campus Institute for Data Science, and the Max Planck-University of Toronto Centre for Neural Science and Technology.

Her research focuses on understanding the fundamental principles of collective information processing in both neural and social networks. She employs approaches from statistical physics and information theory to investigate self-organization and learning processes in living networks. Her work spans several interconnected areas: neural criticality and subsampling effects in network analysis, information processing in neural circuits, and the spread of information (and misinformation) in social networks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she applied her expertise in spreading dynamics to study viral transmission and the effectiveness of interventions, becoming a member of the German government's expert panel on the pandemic.

Her recent publications reveal a strong focus on understanding how neural networks maintain optimal information processing through controlled criticality, how subsampling affects our ability to infer network properties, and the parallels between information spread in neural and social networks. Her work bridges theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, and epidemiology, demonstrating how principles from statistical physics can illuminate collective phenomena across vastly different scales.

• Medal for Scientific Journalism of the German Physical Society (DPG)
• Communitas Award of the Max Planck Society
• Member of the Junge Akademie
• Dannie-Heineman Award of the Academy of Science and Humanities, Göttingen
• Science award of Lower-Saxony - Wissenschaftspreis Niedersachsen
• Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics from the German Physical Society

Professor Priesemann actively mentors numerous PhD students and postdocs in her research group, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between physics, neuroscience, and data science. Her lab investigates topics ranging from neural plasticity and learning to epidemic modeling and information spread in social networks. She has secured significant research funding, including a German-Israel Foundation Young Investigator Grant and projects within the Cluster of Excellence 'Multiscale Bioimaging' and the Max Planck-University of Toronto Centre.

Her research group maintains strong connections with experimentalists and theorists across multiple institutions, creating a vibrant environment for studying the principles of living adaptive networks. She has initiated several interdisciplinary research projects, including a major initiative on curiosity and hierarchical information processing across species.