Time: 13.15-14.15 
Place: 1A.22
Speaker: Dr. Rogier Kievit, Radboud University

Cognitive performance fluctuates across seconds, sessions, days and weeks. As this fluctuation is more challenging to measure and quantify, it has often been neglected in favour of mean cognitive performance. In this talk, I will present new findings from the CODEC study, demonstrating how and why cognitive performance fluctuates, which internal and external factors impact on performance, and what we could, or should, do about it.

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Time: 10.00-11.00 hrs
Location: 0A.28 (FSW/Agora building)
Speaker: Prof. Claudia Barth, Professor of Neurobiology of Hormonal Transitions @Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin.

Abstract: Despite widespread sex differences in prevalence and presentation of numerous illnesses affecting the brain, there has been limited focus on the effects of endocrine aging on brain health in females. The majority of preclinical studies have focused on males only, and clinical studies often analyzed data by covarying for sex, ignoring relevant differences between the sexes. This sex-neutral approach is biased and can contribute to failures of health care providers to deliver targeted treatments and services for all sexes. In my talk, I will spotlight female brain health by informing on the role of sex steroids, particularly estradiol, on the female brain across the lifespan. I will present our work on sex steroid fluctuations and their impact on the female brain across the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause using dense-sampling approaches, large population-based datasets, and machine learning tools. A better understanding of the dramatic changes in the female brain across the lifespan is a critical step towards the development of mechanistic models explaining sex differences in disease susceptibility and a crucial prerequisite for personalised mental health care. 

Bio: Claudia holds a professorship for the neurobiology of hormonal transitions at the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences & the Institute of Gender in Medicine (GiM) at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. She is a biologist and neuroscientist by training with a strong background in neuroendocrinology. Her work integrates preclinical and clinical perspectives as well as computational approaches to study hormonal transition periods and their impact on brain health and psychiatric disorders. She further serves as Chair of the ENIGMA Neuroendocrinology Working Group – Menopause Subgroup and Co-Chair of the ENIGMA Early Onset Psychosis Working Group, to foster global research collaborations on these topics.