!!Gereon Fink - Biography
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Gereon Fink (1964) graduated in Medicine from the University of Cologne, where he received his M.D. degree in 1989. He was a Research Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute of Neurological Research, Cologne, where his research focused on positron emission tomography and neurological disorders. In 1992 he was awarded the Otto-Hahn Award of the Max-Planck-Society, which enabled him to spend a year as a Research Fellow of Prof. Richard Frackowiak at the MRC Cyclotron Unit (Hammersmith Hospital). After continuing his residential training as a neurologist from 1993-1995 at the University Hospital Cologne, he worked from 1995-1997 as a Research Fellow of Prof. Ray Dolan at the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London, pursuing his interests in the neural mechanisms underlying higher cognition and disturbances thereof. Following Board Certification in 1998, he received his habilitation in Düsseldorf. In 1997 Gereon Fink started to work at the Research Centre Jülich, where he became director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine in 2005. From 2001-2006 he worked as a consultant neurologist and Professor of Neurology – Cognitive Neurology at the Department of Neurology of the University Hospital Aachen. In 2006 he became Professor of Neurology at the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne and head of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital Cologne.\\
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Throughout his professional career, Gereon Fink combined his neuroscientific and clinical interests as a neurologist, making him a role model for clinician neuroscientists with a strong translational approach. Gereon Fink has achieved significant improvements in stroke-induced neurological and neuropsychological deficits in patients. He revealed that a lesion-induced neurological deficit results from the lesion itself and lesion-induced dysfunction in remote, primarily unaffected brain regions. He furthermore showed that this disturbance of the neural network architecture strongly affects the recovery of function and can be overcome using systems-based, novel neuromodulatory techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation. Gereon Fink’s work substantially contributes to our understanding of human cerebral plasticity and recovery of function after stroke.\\ \\