Prof Dr Annette Horstmann stud­ied Biol­o­gy at the Ruhr-Uni­ver­si­ty Bochum with a focus on neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy with Prof Dr Klaus-Peter Hoff­mann. After a one-year-stay at the Max Planck Insti­tute (MPI) for Human Cog­ni­tive and Brain Sci­ences (Inde­pen­dent Research Group “Atten­tion & Aware­ness”, Prof John-Dylan Haynes) and com­plet­ing her PhD in the “Inter­na­tion­al Grad­u­ate School of Bio­sciences” in Bochum, she worked in the Depart­ment of Neu­rol­o­gy of the same insti­tute from 2008 to 2010. From 2010 to 2013 she worked as a Research Sci­en­tist in a coop­er­a­tion project between the MPI for Human Cog­ni­tive and Brain Sci­ences and the Inte­grat­ed Research and Treat­ment Cen­ter (IFB) Adi­pos­i­ty­Dis­eases at the Uni­ver­si­ty Clin­ic Leipzig. Between 2013 and 2019 Prof Dr Horstmann was the head of the inde­pen­dent Junior Research Group “Deci­sion-mak­ing in obe­si­ty: neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy, behav­iour & plas­tic­i­ty” with­in the frame­work of the IFB Adi­pos­i­ty­Dis­eases and in coop­er­a­tion with the Depart­ment of Neu­rol­o­gy of the MPI. She con­tin­ues to be PI of the SFB 1052 project Neu­rocog­ni­tive Mod­els of Behav­ioral Con­trol in Obe­si­ty which also began its work in 2013. In 2019 Annette Horstmann moved to Fin­land, to take up her new role as Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at the Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy and Logo­pe­dics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Helsin­ki. She con­tin­ues to run the O’BRAIN Lab in Leipzig, Ger­many, and Helsin­ki, Finland.

Meth­ods she is using include struc­tur­al and func­tion­al MRI, com­put­er­ized behav­iour­al exper­i­ments and the appli­ca­tion of gus­ta­to­ry and olfac­to­ry stim­uli. Her research in the field of neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy of human obe­si­ty was award­ed with the Research Prize of the Ger­man Obe­si­ty Soci­ety in 2016.