Franz R. Schmid
Thinker about the mind, the brain, and other complex systems.
Hello and welcome!
I am Franz, PhD candidate at the Crone Neurocognition Lab / the Cognitive Science Hub Vienna. I investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of creative cognition as well as its links to neurodegenerative diseases.
So far, my journey has brought me to many different places. It all started with a BA in linguistics at the University of Vienna. Baffled by the astonishing contrast between the complexity of language and the ease with wich the human brain manages to process it, I grew a strong interest in the fields of neuro- and psycholinguistics and decided to also do an MA in general and cognitive linguistics. During this time, I worked as a research assistant at the Neuroimaging Labs at the Medical University of Vienna.
Two seminal opportunities followed: an internship and subsequent position as an external researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Lise Meitner Research Group Cognition and Plasticity, as well as the acceptance for the MSc program “Brain and Cognition” at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. This research master’s program gave me the chance to get insights into a broad range of topics that all form part of cognitive neuroscience, and I got to write my thesis on neural population models with the Computational Neuroscience Group at the Center for Brain and Cognition. After coming back from Barcelona, a position as a research assistant for Prof. Susanne Reiterer at the linguistics department at the University of Vienna followed and subsequently a position at the MRI Lab at the University of Graz. There, I was involved in different aspects of MRI data analysis.
Mind and Brain Science 