Introduction

The Department of Experimental Neurology is devoted to applied neuroscience in the areas of (1) neuro-immunology with a focus on antibody-mediated diseases of the nervous system and (2) translational neurology including interdisciplinary stroke research, neuromodulation, neurodegeneration, brain imaging and research on experimental quality standards.

Through close ties with the Department of Neurology at Charité, the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the Center for Stroke Research it aims at providing a strong bi-directional link between basic neuroscience and clinical neurology. More than half of researchers have joint clinical appointments. This enables to focus on research with human biomaterial and clinical data, but also to bridge the gap from in vitro models to clinical trials.

Our mission is (1) to follow up on research questions directly stimulated by clinical needs of neurological patients, (2) to facilitate translational projects driven by young clinician scientists, (3) to translate research findings into the improvement of prevention, treatment and diagnosis of neurological disorders, (4) to initiate investigator-driven clinical studies based on findings from our experimental work, (5) to improve the predictiveness of our preclinical translational research by actively promoting quality standards for experimental work, open access and open data.