Concept
Friedhelm Christoph Hummel (born 1969 in Laichingen, Germany) is a German neuroscientist and neurologist. A full professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, he is the Defitech Chair of Clinical Neuroengineering, and the head of the Hummel Laboratory at EPFL's School of Life Sciences. He also is an associate professor of clinical neuroscience at the University of Geneva. Hummel studied medicine at University of Tübingen and at Bordeaux Segalen University, graduating in 1998. He then joined the Department of Neurology at the University of Tübingen as a medical resident and researcher. He earned his medical doctor degree in 2000 for his work on Plastische Veränderungen durch semantische klassische Konditionierung und ihre elektrokortikalen Korrelate: eine Studie langsamer Potentiale (Plastic changes through semantic classical conditioning and their electrocortical correlates: a study of slow potentials). In 2003, he received a Feodor Lynen award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to join Leonardo Cohen's Human Cortical Physiology and Neurorehabilitation Section (NINDS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at Bethesda. There he worked on the first successful application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in stroke patients. In 2005, he returned as researcher and medical resident to the Department of Neurology at Tübingen, and, in 2006, to the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf to finish his residency. In 2006, he founded the Brain Imaging and Neurostimulation (BINS) Laboratory at Hamburg, became a certified in 2007, co-chairman at the Centre for Sleep Medicine in 2008, senior neurologist in 2013, and vice-director of the Department of neurology in 2013. Since 2016 he holds the Defitech Chair for Clinical Neuroengineering as full professor, is the director of the Hummel Laboratory at the Centre for Neuroprosthetics (CNP) and the Brain Mind Institute (BMI), both at EPFL. Furthermore, he holds an associate professorship of clinical neuroscience at the University of Geneva.
