Meet the editors

Thomas Heinbockel, Ph.D., is a professor and interim chair, Department of Anatomy, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC. He holds an adjunct faculty position in both the Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology and the Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Heinbockel studied biology at the Philipps-University, Germany. His studies of the brain started during his

MS thesis work at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology, Germany. Dr. Heinbockel earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Arizona, USA. After graduating, he worked as a research associate at the Institute of Physiology, Otto-von-Guericke University, Germany. Dr. Heinbockel's research is focused on understanding how the brain processes information as it relates to neurological and psychiatric disorders. His laboratory at Howard University concentrates on foundational and translational topics such as drug development, organization of the olfactory and limbic systems, and neural signaling and synaptic transmission in the central nervous system.

Robert Weissert, MD, Ph.D., did his training in neurology, neuroimmunology, immunology, and genetics in Tuebingen, Germany; Miami and Chicago, USA; and the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Between 1999 and 2007, in addition to his clinical duties as a neurologist at the University Hospital in Tuebingen, he headed a group of experimental neuroimmunology funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Hertie Institute of

Clinical Brain Research. From 2007 to 2010, he worked as a director of research and development of a large pharmaceutical company in Geneva, Switzerland, and was a senior physician in the Department of Neurology, Cantonal Hospital, University of Geneva. Since 2011, Dr. Weissert has been working as a senior physician (neurology) and researcher at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he had been a university professor of clinical neurobiology with a focus on neuroimmunology and neuroinflammation from 2012 to 2018. Since 2018, he has been an honorary professor at the University of Regensburg. Dr. Weissert has made important contributions to the understanding of the pathogenesis of neuroimmunological diseases and the establishment of novel treatment options with a focus on multiple sclerosis.
