Markus Diesmann received his Diploma and PhD in Physics from the University of Bochum (Germany) in 1994 and 2002. The PhD work was conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot (Israel) and continued at the University of Freiburg (Germany). In 1999 Markus joined the Max-Planck-Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Goettingen (Germany) for a staff position. From 2004 to 2006 he was appointed Juniorprofessor for Computational Neurophysics at the University of Freiburg. Between 2006 and 2011 , Markus was Unit and Team Leader at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako (Japan). Since 2011,

He is Director at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6), Computational and Systems Neuroscience and the Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6), Theoretical Neuroscience, at Jülich Research Centre, Germany and is Professor at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His interests include the correlation structure of cortical networks and large-scale simulations.