Jens Volkmann

Jens Volkmann is full professor and chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital Würzburg, Germany. He is an internationally renowned movement disorder specialist with an extensive scientific record in the field of movement disorder pathophysiology and deep brain stimulation therapy. He has planned and executed several seminal studies on deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease, tremor and dystonia, which have helped to establish level I evidence for this therapy. He is responsible for the dystonia treatment guidelines of the German Neurological Association.
He coordinates or serves on the board of several national and European research consortia such as ERANet-Neuron (Eurdyscover), SFB-TRR 295 “Retune” (collaborative research center on DBS mechanisms) or DYSTRACT (German dystonia research network). He is past president of the German Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders society, co-founder and president of the German Parkinson Foundation, past president of the German Society for Clinical Neurophysiology and active member of the International Movement Disorder Society.
Dr. Volkmann graduated in medicine at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf in 1993 and received a doctoral degree in medical sciences in 1995. In his doctoral thesis project Dr. Volkmann studied central oscillations related to parkinsonian resting tremor using magnetoencephalography. This work was conducted as visiting researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Rodolfo Llinás at the Department of Physiology of New York University from 1991 to 1993. From 1994 to 2001 Dr. Volkmann trained in neurology and psychiatry at Heinrich-Heine-University Hospital, Düsseldorf, and worked in several research projects related to the pathophysiology of movement disorders. He was among the first neurologists in Germany to start a program for deep brain stimulation in movement disorders in collaboration with Prof. Volker Sturm at the Department of Stereotaxy and Functional Neurosurgery of Cologne University in 1995. He continued this work during an appointment as associate professor of neurology at Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany from 2001 to 2010, where he worked with Prof. Günther Deuschl on several larger clinical trials on deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease and dystonia. He was appointed full professor and chairman of neurology at Würzburg University Hospital in 2010. His current research activities include human and translational research into mechanisms of deep brain stimulation, clinical trials for optimized DBS therapy and pathophysiologivcal studies on the circuitry dysfunctions underlying movement disorders.

MAIN SCIENTIFIC INTERESTS

Movement disorders, motor networks, motor pathophysiology, invasive and non-invasive neuromodulation, translational neuromodulation research

POSSIBLE PHD PROJECTS

Connectomic mapping of DBS effects, retrospective clinical analysis of neuromodulation effects, videokinematic analysis of DBS effects

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

Please visit https://sfb-retune.de/en/home/