Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. Petra Ritter
Petra Ritter is a full professor for Brain Simulation. She heads the Brain Simulation Section with an interdisciplinary team of developers, engineers, scientists and medical doctors at the Berlin Institute of Health and the Dept. of Neurology, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Her research focuses on integrating multi-level data in computational models of the brain to discover multi-scale mechanisms of brain function and dysfunction.
She is leading the development of a Virtual Research Environment - a collaborative research platform for sensitive health data. Petra Ritter serves as the lead of the German national research infrastructure initiative neuroscience (NFDI-Neuroscience). She also serves as lead of a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Project - The Virtual Brain Cloud - funded with €15Mill to implement a distributed research infrastructure for health data in the EU. In her role as the lead of the Co-design Project The Virtual Brain she has directed the implementation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant simulation and processing workflows in the Human Brain Project's e-infrastructure EBRAINS. She is presently leading the development of the Health Data Cloud - EBRAINS' service for sensitive data.
Petra Ritter co-leads the open-source The Virtual Brain simulation platform with >35k software downloads since its first release in 2012. Petra Ritter has been awarded a competitive European Research Council Consolidator (ERC) grant. Her training as an MD she received at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, UCSD, UCLA, Mount Sinai Hospital NY and the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Charitéplatz 1
10117 Berlin
Articles
Fekonja, L. S., Forkel, S. J., Aydogan, D. B., Lioumis, P., Cacciola, A., Lucas, C. W., Tournier, J., Vergani, F., Ritter, P., Schenk, R., Shams, B., Engelhardt, M. J., Picht, T. 2025. »Translational network neuroscience: Nine roadblocks and possible solutions.« Network Neuroscience, 9 (1): 352-370.
https://doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00435
Hofmann, A., Widmann, J., Brandstetter, L., Selig, U., Haug, F., Haug, J., Pryss, R., Mecklenburg, J., Kreichgauer, A., Capetian, P., Hartmann, C. J., Niklas, C., Ritter, P., Krause, P., Schnitzler, A., Volkmann, J., Kühn, A. A., Heuschmann, P., Haas, K. 2025. »Development and application of a clinical core data set for deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease, dystonia or tremor: from data collection to data exchange and data sharing.« Neurological Research and Practice, 7 (1)
https://doi.org/10.1186/s42466-024-00362-z
Kashyap, A., Geenjaar, E., Bey, P., Dhindsa, K., Glomb, K., Plis, S., Keilholz, S., Ritter, P. 2025. »Using an ordinary differential equation model to separate rest and task signals in fMRI.« Nature Communications, 16 (1)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62491-6
Bey, P., Dhindsa, K., Kashyap, A., Schirner, M., Feldheim, J., Bönstrup, M., Schulz, R., Cheng, B., Thomalla, G., Gerloff, C., Ritter, P. 2024. »A lesion‐aware automated processing framework for clinical stroke magnetic resonance imaging.« Human Brain Mapping, 45 (9)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.26701
Giehl, K., Mutsaerts, H., Aarts, K., Barkhof, F., Caspers, S., Chetelat, G., Colin, M., Düzel, E., Frisoni, G. B., Ikram, M. A., Jovicich, J., Morbelli, S., Oertel, W., Paret, C., Perani, D., Ritter, P., Segura, B., Wisse, L. E. M., De Witte, E., Cappa, S. F., van Eimeren, T. 2024. »Sharing brain imaging data in the Open Science era: how and why?« The Lancet Digital Health, 6 (7): e526-e535.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S2589-7500(24)00069-4
Koller, D. P., Schirner, M., Ritter, P. 2024. »Human connectome topology directs cortical traveling waves and shapes frequency gradients.« Nature Communications, 15 (1)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47860-x
Rajamani, N., Friedrich, H., Butenko, K., Dembek, T., Lange, F., Navrátil, P., Zvarova, P., Hollunder, B., de Bie, R. M. A., Odekerken, V. J. J., Volkmann, J., Xu, X., Ling, Z., Yao, C., Ritter, P., Neumann, W., Skandalakis, G. P., Komaitis, S., Kalyvas, A., Koutsarnakis, C., Stranjalis, G., Barbe, M., Milanese, V., Fox, M. D., Kühn, A. A., Middlebrooks, E., Li, N., Reich, M., Neudorfer, C., Horn, A. 2024. »Author Correction: Deep brain stimulation of symptom-specific networks in Parkinson’s disease.« Nature Communications, 15 (1)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51394-7
Stasinski, J., Taher, H., Meier, J. M., Schirner, M., Perdikis, D., Ritter, P. 2024. »Homeodynamic feedback inhibition control in whole-brain simulations.« PLOS Computational Biology, 20 (12): e1012595.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012595
Petkoski, S., Ritter, P., Jirsa, V. K. 2023. »White-matter degradation and dynamical compensation support age-related functional alterations in human brain.« Cerebral Cortex.
https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac500
Chettouf, S., Triebkorn, P., Daffertshofer, A., Ritter, P. 2022. »Unimanual sensorimotor learning—A simultaneous EEG‐fMRI aging study.« Human Brain Mapping, 43 (7): 2348-2364.
https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25791
Gulín-González, J., Bringas-Vega, M. L., Martínez-Montes, E., Ritter, P., Solodkin, A., Valdes-Sosa, M. J., Valdes-Sosa, P. A. 2022. »Editorial: Brain Modeling of Neurogenerative Disorders.« Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 16
https://doi.org/10.3389/fninf.2022.937790
Schirner, M., Domide, L., Perdikis, D., Triebkorn, P., Stefanovski, L., Pai, R., Prodan, P., Valean, B., Palmer, J., Langford, C., Blickensdörfer, A., van der Vlag, M., Diaz-Pier, S., Peyser, A., Klijn, W., Pleiter, D., Nahm, A., Schmid, O., Woodman, M., Zehl, L., Fousek, J., Petkoski, S., Kusch, L., Hashemi, M., Marinazzo, D., Mangin, J., Flöel, A., Akintoye, S., Stahl, B. C., Cepic, M., Johnson, E., Deco, G., McIntosh, A. R., Hilgetag, C. C., Morgan, M., Schuller, B., Upton, A., McMurtrie, C., Dickscheid, T., Bjaalie, J. G., Amunts, K., Mersmann, J., Jirsa, V., Ritter, P. 2022. »Brain simulation as a cloud service: The Virtual Brain on EBRAINS.« NeuroImage, 251: 118973.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.118973
Schirner, M., Kong, X., Yeo, B. T., Deco, G., Ritter, P. 2022. »Dynamic primitives of brain network interaction.« NeuroImage, 250: 118928.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.118928
Sheth, K., Ritter, P. L., Lorig, K., Steinman, L., FallCreek, S. 2021. »Remote Delivery of the Chronic Pain Self-management Program Using Self-directed Materials and Small-group Telephone Support: A Pilot Study.« Journal of Applied Gerontology, 41 (5): 1329-1335.
https://doi.org/10.1177/07334648211062805