The 16th edition of the Alpine Brain Imaging Meeting, ABIM’2022, an international neuroscience conference yearly organized by five labs from CIBM’s founding partner institutions, University of Geneva and EPFL, took place from January 9th to 13th, 2022, in the picturesque village of Champéry, with 134 participants. Hosting speakers from all over the world, the meeting is ideal to combine science and skiing, in a bursting week of scientific exchanges and fun.
This edition saw a welcome reception with an opening keynote from Stanislas Dehaene from Collège de France, Paris. During the week, speakers from Poland, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, USA and Finland shared insights into their work. Daily topics were “Language & Development”, “Social Perception & Cognition across Primate Species”, “Emotions” and “Consciousness & Decision Making”. In addition, all participants had the chance to present their research findings during three poster sessions.
Despite the challenging times due to COVID, a careful organization allowed participants to safely attend the meeting in person, after the cancellation of the 2021 edition. The weather rewarded everyone with a week of great sun and snow, to welcome enthusiastic “ABIMers” back on the slopes.
Two awards were assigned during the usual closing fondue, a farewell dinner that allowed participants to greet and taste Swiss specialties. The Brain Topography Best Presentation Award was won by Leonie Koban (Sorbonne University, Paris) with her talk entitled “An fMRI-based brain marker of individual differences in delay discounting predicts overweight and metabolic markers”, while the Brain Topography Best Poster Award was assigned to the poster “Graph signal processing to investigate brain structure-function coupling provides signatures for task decoding and individual fingerprinting” by Alessandra Griffa (UNIGE) and presented by senior author Maria Giulia Preti (CIBM SP EPFL -UNIGE Section).
CIBM thanks all the members of the ABIM organizing committee for a truly participative event, representing the exciting development of neuroscience research in the region:
- Patrik Vuilleumier and Ilaria Sani, Neurology and Imaging of Cognition Lab
- Christoph Michel, Functional Brain Mapping Lab
- Dimitri Van De Ville, Medical Image Processing Lab
- Maria Giulia Preti, CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging
- Daphné Bavelier, Brain and Learning – Bavelier.lab
- Didier Maurice Grandjean, NEAD Neuroscience of Emotion and Affective Dynamics Lab
- Frédéric Grouiller, Brain and Behaviour Laboratory (BBL)
- Laura Riontino, Sleep and Memory Lab
Special thanks to the administrative staff, Sara Bowen, Françoise Defferrard and Frédéric Radeff from the University of Geneva for their support.
