Prof. Dr. med. Lorenz Deserno
Lorenz has a background in medicine and has obtained his doctoral degree from Charité Berlin; he received post-doctoral training in neuroscience at Charité Berlin, MPI Leipzig and the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry. He is also board-certified in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and consultant of the ADHD outpatient service.
Together with his team, he aims to understand the development of psychiatric symptoms in a transdiagnostic manner through the lens of learning and decision-making problems and how this is implemented in the human brain. Understanding the role of monoaminergic neuromodulators, in particular dopamine, in this regard is inspired by computational models of reinforcement learning, which are a backbone in the lab’s work.
We aim towards clinical useful prediction in the long run such as understanding differential response to psychopharmacology, which we study in the context of treatment response to methylphenidate in childhood ADHD. We use a range of methods including behavioral testing, fMRI, EEG as well as smartphone-based Ecological Momentary Assessments with a focus on gamified behavioral testing. Our research is funded by the DFG and the BMFTR. We are part of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre on Substance Use Disorder TRR265 (www.trr265.org) , the DFG-funded Research Training Group 2660 Approach-Avoidance (https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/grk2660) and of the BMFTR-funded network ‘Gamki’ for the development of digital psychotherapy in youth (https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/gamki).
Lorenz is an enthusiastic football supporter of Eintracht Frankfurt, FC Arsenal and TG Höchberg.