Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Frankfurt

Christine M. Freitag, MA, MD, PhD (Habilitation), is Director of the Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatic Medicine, and Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2008. She is a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry and psychotherapy, training officer for the State Medical Association of Hessen, and behavioural therapy supervisor. She completed studies in human medicine (MD) and Protestant Theology (MA). Her career includes clinical training and research positions in New York, Washington DC, Heidelberg, London, Cologne and Homburg. She co‑founded the German Scientific Association for Autism Spectrum Disorders. Since 2015 she has been on the board of the German Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She is Editor of European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and a member of the DFG Neuroscience Review Board. Her work centres on neurodevelopmental and behavioural disorders covering genetics, endophenotypes, biomarkers, classification, mediation models, EEG and innovative interventions. She has led major multicentre RCTs and projects (FemNAT‑CD, SOSTA‑net, A‑FFIP, StimAT, PROUD) and currently participates in LOEWE DYNAMIC, Transregio SFB 379, and the EU R2D2‑Mental Health project.

Leonie Polzer studied Psychology (B.Sc.) and Clinical Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience (M.Sc.) at Goethe University Frankfurt, followed by a PhD at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Her doctoral research examined early interactions between neurophysiological arousal and attentional difficulties in autism. In 2023, she was a visiting researcher at the Neurodevelopment Lab at Uppsala University (Sweden) and the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck University London (UK).  After her PhD, she joined the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Neurophysiology Lab, which she leads since 2025. Her current research integrates EEG and pupillometry to investigate alterations of neurophysiological circuits and their consequences in neurodevelopmental disorders.

Lisa Berg studied Biological Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, where she obtained her Bachelor of Science in 2017. She subsequently completed a Master of Science in Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in 2020. In 2021, she began her PhD at Goethe University Hospital Frankfurt in the lab of Christine Ecker, focusing on imaging genetics of autism. In 2024, she started a new research position in the group of Prof. Freitag, where she investigates aggression in children and adolescents with mental disorders using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and clinical assessments.

Julia Frey received her B.Sc. in Psychology in 2023 and her M.Sc. in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy from the University of Freiburg in 2025. During her Master’s she examined the impact of sleep on the cardiovascular system and emotional processing, combining physiological measures (ECG) with neuroimaging methods (fMRI). Since 2025, she is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital Frankfurt, where her work focuses on phenotypic clustering in autism in preschool-aged children and the assessment of intervention effects.

Anna K. Müller holds a B.Sc. in Psychology from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and an M.Sc. in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience from Goethe University Frankfurt. Since 2022, she has been pursuing a PhD in the MIND CHILD research group, headed by Dr. Nico Bast, and the Neurophysiology Lab, at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry department of the University Hospital Frankfurt. Her research focuses on sensory processing in autism and other mental health conditions using pupillometry, electrocardiography (ECG), and electroencephalography (EEG).

Christine Ecker is a Heisenberg Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. She originally trained as a psychologist at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and completed an MSc in neuroscience at the University of Oxford. Her current work is directed towards establishing neuroanatomy as a biomarker for ASD, which may be utilized in the MRI-assisted diagnosis of autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. She is also one of the newly appointed Innovation Fellows in her Department. The Innovation Fellowship Scheme has recently been introduced by King’s College Business Ltd to support the promotion and identification of King’s innovation through research and its subsequent impact.

Alessio Giacomel is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computational Neuroscience and Neurodevelopment Lab. He earned a BSc in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Trento, an MSc in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Padua, and a PhD in Neuroimaging from King’s College London. His doctoral research focused on the application of imaging transcriptomics and normative modelling to positron emission tomography (PET). His current research centres on the multimodal integration of neuroimaging data to investigate aggression.

Caroline Gurr studied Psychology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Glasgow, where she obtained her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees. During her studies, she gained research experience in non-invasive brain stimulation and neuroimaging, with a particular focus on applications of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and resting-state fMRI. She completed her PhD at Goethe University Frankfurt in the lab of Christine Ecker, where her doctoral research investigated the applications of surface-based morphometry in autism spectrum disorder. Her research focuses on neurodevelopment, autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions, and brain structure. In addition to her research work, she has extensive clinical experience in autism diagnosis and therapy. She is currently undergoing training in cognitive behavioural therapy and will soon obtain her approbation.

Afsheen Yousaf is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computational Neuroscience and Neurodevelopment Lab.

Wiebke Hennig received her M.Sc. degree in Artificial Intelligence at Maastricht University and has a background in software development. She gained international experience during a work and travel stay in Japan and joined the Computational Neuroimaging field as a PhD student at Goethe University Hospital Frankfurt. As a member of Prof. Dr. Christine Ecker’s lab (Computational Neuroscience and Neurodevelopment) and in association with Prof. Dr. Jochen Triesch (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) she focuses on data management and the application of AI methods in autism and aggression research, contributing to the advancement of personalised medicine.

Bassem Hermila is a PhD candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt, where he also completed his Master’s degree in Neuroscience. During his Master’s thesis at the Ernst Strüngmann Institut, he worked on the computational classification of neuronal morphologies into cell types, which sparked his interest in brain organization across different levels of analysis. In his doctoral research, he continued in computational neuroscience while shifting his focus toward structural MRI of the human brain. As part of the Horizon Europe project R2D2-MH, his current work integrates structural neuroimaging with genetics and transcriptomics to investigate the biological basis of neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and ADHD.

Alexandre Jeanne studied at the Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnologies de Strasbourg (France) where he received a M.Sc and an engineer degree in Hight-throughput Biotechnology (2020). From 2021 to 2024, he worked as a quantitative biology engineer at Nanolive SA (Switzerland) where he worked on bioimages analysis and developed machine-learning tools for the segmentation of holotomography images. In September 2024, he joined the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the University Hospital Frankfurt as a PhD candidate in Neuroscience under the supervision of Prof. Christine Ecker. His research focuses on the stratification of autism based on structural MRI data.

Currently on parental leave.

Franziska Müller is a PhD student in the Computational Neurosciences and Neurodevelopment Lab supervised by Christine Ecker. She studied molecular biology (BSc) and biomedicine (Msc) at Gutenberg-University in Mainz. After a few years working in health economics in the pharmaceutical industry, she began her PhD at Goethe University in 2025. Her research focuses on how brain imaging patterns relate to gene expression, both within and beyond autism.

Hanna Seelemeyer did her B.Sc. in psychology at the University of Osnabrück and went on to complete a M.Sc. in clinical psychology and neuroscience at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Afterwards she started her PhD within the R2D2-MH consortium (Risk and Resilience in Developmental Diversity) researching neurodevelopmental trajectories of resilient adaptive outcomes and clinical phenotypes in autism using structural MRI under the supervision of Prof. Christine Ecker. Alongside her PhD, Hanna trained as a child and adolescent psychotherapist in cognitive behavioral therapy and received her license in April 2026.

Our groups are further complemented by MD candidates, research assistants, interns, graduate and undergraduate students.