Dr Maximilian Jonas Wessel has been appointed Professor of Neuromodulation in Neurology at the Department of Human Medicine. He is also the new senior physician at the University Clinic for Neurology at the Evangelisches Krankenhaus in Oldenburg. He previously worked as a neurologist and junior research group leader at the University Hospital Würzburg.
Wessel studied medicine at Kiel University and obtained his doctorate from Hamburg University in 2018. He then conducted research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) before moving to the University Hospital of Würzburg in 2021. There, he completed his specialist training and conducted research on neural plasticity in movement disorders, including as co-project leader in the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre ReTune.
Wessel develops neurotechnological procedures that help patients with neurological disorders regain motor and cognitive functions. His focus is on non-invasive transcranial temporal interference stimulation (tTIS), in which several high-frequency currents applied to the scalp overlap in the brain and enable targeted stimulation of deeper brain regions. With a team of scientists, Wessel has demonstrated that such stimulation of the striatum – a brain area that plays a central role in motor control, among other things – can promote motor learning.
