Dr. Jiri Hammer, PhD

Team Leader

jiri.hammer@lfmotol.cuni.cz

Cognitive Brain Research Group

Department of Neurology, Second Faculty of Medicine, Charles University and Motol University Hospital

Scientific background

Following my graduation from Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), I continued my studies as a PhD student in Neuroscience at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience at Freiburg University (Germany). The topic of my PhD thesis was related to brain-computer interfaces: Representation of continuous hand movements in human electrocorticography. After obtaining the PhD, I became a postdoc at the Neuroimaging AI Lab, University Hospital Freiburg, Germany and at the Department of Neurology, Second Faculty of Medicine, Charles University and Motol University Hospital, where I currently work as a senior researcher and a group leader of EpiReC’s Cognitive Brain Research Group.

Research interests

Through my research in cognitive neuroscience, I have tried to uncover how the brain orchestrates its activity consisting of billions of interconnected neurons giving rise to skilled motor behavior and seamless conscious experience. We take advantage of unique measurements of electrophysiological activity directly from the human brain, so-called intracranial EEG, which is obtained in the course of invasive monitoring of epilepsy patients. I focus on brain dynamics during different cognitive tasks from the perspective of intracranial EEG.

Selected publications

Hammer, J., Kajsova, M., Kalina, A., Krysl, D., Fabera, P., Kudr, M., … & Marusic, P. (2024). Antagonistic behavior of brain networks mediated by low-frequency oscillations: electrophysiological dynamics during internal-external attention switching. bioRxiv, 2024-03. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.14.584984

Kalina, A., Jezdik, P., Fabera, P., Marusic, P., & Hammer, J. (2023). Electrical source Imaging of somatosensory evoked potentials from intracranial EEG signals. Brain Topography, 36(6), 835-853. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-023-00994-5

Cecchi, R., Vinckier, F., Hammer, J., Marusic, P., Nica, A., Rheims, S., … & Bastin, J. (2022). Intracerebral mechanisms explaining the impact of incidental feedback on mood state and risky choice. Elife, 11, e72440. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72440

Hammer, J., Schirrmeister, R. T., Hartmann, K., Marusic, P., Schulze-Bonhage, A., & Ball, T. (2022). Interpretable functional specialization emerges in deep convolutional networks trained on brain signals. Journal of neural engineering, 19(3), 036006. https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ac6770

Völker, M., Fiederer, L. D., Berberich, S., Hammer, J., Behncke, J., Kršek, P., … & Ball, T. (2018). The dynamics of error processing in the human brain as reflected by high-gamma activity in noninvasive and intracranial EEG. Neuroimage, 173, 564-579. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.01.059