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.