Institute of Medical Psychology

Jochen Kaiser studied psychology from 1989 to 1994 at the universities of Mainz and Glasgow/UK. This was followed by a PhD supervised by John Gruzelier at Imperial College School of Medicine (University of London/UK). From 1998 to 2004, he was a post-doc at the University of Tübingen Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology headed by Niels Birbaumer. Since that time, he has developed a research focus on auditory working memory. He spent a DFG-funded research stay with Olivier Bertrand at INSERM Lyon/France in 2001/2002. In 2004, Jochen was appointed professor at Goethe University and director of the Institute of Medical Psychology (IMP). From 2018 to 2025, he was the acting head of the MEG unit at COBIC.

Christoph Bledowski has been working at the Institute for Medical Psychology in Frankfurt since 2004. He studied psychology in Freiburg and Bonn between 1996 and 2001. In 2001, he moved to Frankfurt and worked in the Tandem Project at the Max Planck Institute of Brain Research and the Department of Psychiatry at Goethe University until 2004. This tandem project was led by David Linden, and during this time, Christoph conducted his PhD studies. In 2008, Christoph also worked as a visiting researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, under the supervision of James Rowe, a programme leader.

Dana Finkelstein has been working at the Institute for Medical Psychology in Frankfurt since February 2026. She is an experienced Office and Operations professional. Prior to joining IMP, she worked in office administration at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and held several roles at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries in global supply chain, R&D project planning and regulatory affairs. Dana holds a degree in Business Administration.

Laura-Isabelle Klatt is a DAAD PRIME Fellow currently spending a one-year placement at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen. She studied Psychology in Bochum and Freiburg before joining the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors (IfADo) in Dortmund, where she completed her PhD on EEG correlates of auditory selective attention and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher. Her current and past postdoctoral research has examined the interplay of attention, multisensory processing and working memory, including research visits to the University of Salzburg and the University of Birmingham. It now focuses on audiovisual binding in working memory, combining EEG, behavioral methods, and computational modeling.

Yury Markov studied psychology at HSE University, where he received his B.Sc. (2017), M.Sc. with honours (2019), and PhD (2022) under the supervision of Igor S. Utochkin. His doctoral research examined the structure of visual working memory. From 2020 to 2023, he was a visiting researcher at the Laboratory of Psychophysics at EPFL (Switzerland), working with Michael Herzog and David Pascucci. Since 2023, he has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Scene Grammar Lab at Goethe University Frankfurt under the supervision of Melissa Lê-Hoa Võ. In 2026, he joined the Institute of Medical Psychology, where he investigates serial dependence in visual cognition. His research focuses on visual perception, working memory, visual search, and ensemble representations.

Philipp studied psychology at the University of Trier until 2018, before obtaining his Master’s degree in Psychology with a focus on Cognitive Neurosciences from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2022. During his Master’s studies at the Institute of Medical Psychology, he investigated how distraction affects auditory working memory representations using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Since April 2022, he has continued at the Institute as a PhD candidate, now investigating how humans maintain precise visual working memory representations using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and computational modeling of behavioral data.

Melek completed her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology in 2021 and Philosophy in 2022 at Yeditepe University (Istanbul, Turkey). She subsequently moved to Frankfurt to pursue her Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience at Goethe University. After a research rotation at the Institute of Medical Psychology, she completed her Master’s thesis on decoding auditory working memory content using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Since December 2024, she has continued to investigate how the brain encodes and maintains auditory information during working memory tasks as a PhD candidate at the lab.

Anna completed her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at Maastricht University (Netherland)s, in 2019 and her Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and Clinical Neuropsychology at Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy) in 2021. During her Master’s, she conducted her thesis research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, focusing on the localization of rapid finger movements using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Since May 2022, she has been a PhD candidate at the Institute of Medical Psychology, where she investigates feature binding in working memory using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).