The SCIoI Executive Board, elected by the cluster’s scientific staff, is responsible for all major decisions within the cluster and for developing the SCIoI research program. It also provides guidance to both the scientific staff and the coordination office on SCIoI’s objectives. The Board also decides on policies and funding applications, determines the admission of external PIs, advises on budgeting decisions, and oversees quality assurance within the cluster.
The Executive Board consists of the SCIoI spokesperson, four Principal Investigators, a Postdoctoral representative and a PhD representative.
Meet our Executive Board members:

Oliver Brock
(spokesperson)

Jörg Raisch
(deputy spokesperson)
Jörg Raisch represents the discipline control. His research interests include both methodological and applied aspects of control. In the context of SCIoI, his work on abstraction-based synthesis of discrete event and hybrid control systems, on consistent control hierarchies, and on consensus-based control of multiagent systems will be particularly relevant.

Christa Thöne-Reineke
Christa Thöne-Reineke represents the analytical discipline of behavioral biology. She has extensive experience in laboratory animal science and animal models, especially in animal behavior as read out for severity assessment and animal welfare. She will study the costs and benefits of cognition and the influence of emotion and well-being on animal behavior.

Marcel Brass

Jens Krause

David Bierbach
(Postdoc representative)
David Bierbach is a biologist working on topics that range from individual differences to large-scale collective behaviors. He integrates field-based studies with analytical and experimental approaches in the laboratory. Through his highly interdisciplinary work, he has developed several experimental techniques to study animal behavior in the most standardized ways, from video playbacks and computer animations to the use of bio-mimetic robots. His main research objectives are tropical freshwater fish like clonal mollies (Poecilia formosa), guppies (P. reticulata) or sulfur mollies (P. sulphuraria). At SCIoI, he is investigating how fish use anticipation in their social interactions. The overall aim is to implement this knowledge to build better bio-mimetic robots and social interaction algorithms.

Jonas Frenkel
(PhD representative)
Jonas has a background in psychology and human factors. With a keen interest in the interplay between humans and machines, his research focuses on the field of human-robot interaction in general and social robotics in particular. Prior to joining SCIoI, he worked on developing robotic therapy scenarios for children with autism by using emotion-sensitive technology. At SCIoI, he is working on developing computational models of nonverbal social behaviors in order to improve our understanding of the underlying principles of social interactions and to eventually allow synthetic agents to perceive and appropriately react to social cue.