Christian Beckmann - Biography#
Christian Beckmann is Full Professor of Statistics in Imaging Neurosciences at the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen and principal investigator of the Donders Institute. He obtained his MSc and DPhil degrees at University of Oxford, UK in 20014, where he continues to hold a senior research fellowship. He applies an interdisciplinary approach integrating cognitive neuroimaging, imaging genetics and pharmacology.
His group develops novel approaches for improved ‘data understanding’ in imaging neuroscience, where the research is concentrated on the technical development of Independent Component Analysis and the application to the merging fields of connectomics, imaging epidemiology and big data analytics. The focus is on computational analysis approaches that are sensitive, specific and interpretable in the context of neurobiological processes. In order to maximize practical impact, his work is translate into user-accessible, well-supported software tools for both basic and clinical neuroimaging scientists via the software package FSL (FMRIB Software Library) which is in regular use in >650 institutions worldwide.
He has authored than 145 articles (> 21000 citations; >3500 citations per year) in renowned journals including PNAS, Brain, Nature Neuroscience, eLift and Biological Psychiatry. With an H-index of 48, 12 of his seminal papers cited >500 times and an average citation count of >150 he has appeared annually since 2014 on the Thomson Reuter/Clarivate Analytics list if ‘Highly Cited Researcher’, awarded to only 3 scientists in NL in Neuroscience category.
Christian has received the 2011 Wiley Young Investigators Award of the Society for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and a 2014 Vidi Awards from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research. He trained >20 PhD students (8 completed) and 9 postdoctoral researchers. His career has been strongly international, receiving undergraduate training in Germany and graduate training (MSc & DPhil) as well as postdoctoral training in the UK before holding faculty posts in the UK and the Netherlands.
