Hi! My name is Johannes Roth and currently I’m pursuing a PhD in the field of computational cognitive neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Science in Leipzig (and the University of Gießen), under the supervision of Martin Hebart.

Research interests

My PhD is primarily about making the data acquisition for large-scale deep phenotyping studies in vision science (like in the THINGS initiative) more efficient. This involves two primary research questions: can we record the human visual system at much higher frequencies than what’s believed to be possible, and is there a way to pre-select the most informative images to maximize how much we can learn from each scan? In my research, I’m focusing specifically on fMRI data, integrating computational modeling and machine learning methods to answer these questions. I’m always open for input and ideas, just write me a mail if you want to talk!

Academic background

I obtained a Master in Computer Science at Leipzig University, choosing courses on data science, machine learning, medical image processing and neuroscience. I had the great pleasure of also writing my masters thesis at the MPI CBS under the supervision of Martin and Katja Seeliger, where I researched methods for the generation of images that cause high activations in specific brain areas, using deep learning models of the human visual system. For my Bachelor I studied Business Information Systems, also in Leipzig.

Work experience

During my studies I had multiple jobs as a working student, mostly as a data scientist. At Check24 I developed an image processing and deduplication microservice and optimized their recommendation and ranking system. Before that, I worked on a complex image deduplication system at Webdata Solutions, which became the basis for a research grant. I also had a stint as a data engineer at Mercateo, building ETL pipelines and assisting with developing a data warehouse, as an intern at GISA, developing message transfer in ABAP and building an MVP for a new metering app, and as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate course on distributed systems (for two semesters) and for an undergraduate course on marketing.