TRANSCEND gets funded by Horizon Europe!

When we first started talking about the translational gap in neuroscience back in 2018, none of us imagined where that conversation would lead. What began as an exchange of ideas between Lara Keuck, Klaus Eyer, and Linda Douw slowly grew into something much larger: a vision to bridge the worlds of basic and clinical neuroscience, of experiment and computation, of medicine and philosophy.

Those early discussions were driven by curiosity and an unease with the boundaries that too often separate scientific disciplines. Over the next years, our conversations spilled into conference halls in Zurich and Philadelphia, took shape during writing marathons in Berlin, and deepened through countless debates about how to connect scales, methods, and epistemic ways of thinking.

From that shared curiosity emerged TRANSCEND, a European doctoral network that now brings together 11 partner institutions and 13 early-stage researchers. It’s a project grounded in collaboration, across countries, disciplines, and scientific traditions, and it’s beginning right now!

As TRANSCEND took form, our community expanded. Brilliant colleagues joined us: Edwin van Dellen, Lisa Genzel, Victor Greiff, Sara Green, Kaat Alaerts, Daniela Latorre, and Steeves Demazeux. Each added their own perspective, shaping the program into something more than any of us could have envisioned in those first conversations. We are very excited to get started!

At MULTINET, we will host a doctoral candidate working on, not surprisingly, bridging scales of research in neuroscience. This PhD candidate will be collaborating closely with Rachel and Dorien, and will take the computational route of connecting cells, circuits, and whole-brain networks in already available data. Ultimately, our aim with this project within TRANSCEND is to have better models and methods for translational science!