ECTRIMS Announces New Cohort of Fellows Advancing MS Research and Care
The ECTRIMS Fellowship Programmes support the next generation of leaders in multiple sclerosis research and care by awarding early-career professionals funded placements at leading institutions, where they can advance their knowledge, develop clinical and research expertise, and contribute to progress in MS and related neurological conditions.
The ECTRIMS (Postdoctoral Research, Clinical, and Allied Health Professional), as well as MAGNIMS, MEDEN and MSIF McDonald Fellowship programmes, all provide funded placements at a European institution of the applicants’ choice, where fellows work under the tutelage of some of the world’s leading experts in multiple sclerosis.
2026 ECTRIMS Fellowship Programme Awardees:
ECTRIMS Clinical Training Fellowship Programme
This programme provides successful candidates with the opportunity to learn the latest techniques in patient management and care, while helping to foster their careers as MS physicians.
Cândida Driemeyer’s placement at the Multiple Sclerosis Centre of Catalonia (Cemcat), Clinical chief Neurology/Neuroimmunology Department in Barcelona, Spain, will help her gain advanced clinical and organisational experience. She believes training in this environment will provide not only technical expertise, but also insight into how multidisciplinary systems can be effectively organised and sustained. Her career plan is to “bridge high-level clinical training with equitable access to healthcare, using the knowledge and perspective gained through the ECTRIMS Fellowship to improve patient outcomes, foster interdisciplinary education, and promote sustainable research development”. Her research topic is “Clinical profile of late-onset multiple sclerosis: a retrospective comparative cohort analysis”.
Dr Andreas Liampas, from Greece, will work at the Queen Square Multiple Sclerosis Centre (QSMSC), Department of Neuroinflammation, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, at University College London in London, England. Through this fellowship, he hopes to gain expertise to support the development of modern MS services in Cyprus. His overarching goal is to acquire advanced, hands-on expertise in the clinical management of MS. During his fellowship, he will work on a research project titled, “Evaluating Slowly Expanding Lesions as Predictors of Disease Progression in a UK Autologous Haematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation MS Cohort”.
Dr Camila Lopes Figueiredo, from Brazil, will join the unit of acute and inflammatory neurology in the department of Neurology at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, France. She said her long-term goal is to return to Brazil and contribute to the development of neuroimmunology at Santa Casa de São Paulo, the institution that shaped her training. She intends to help expand structured MS care pathways, integrate the use of imaging and biomarkers into clinical practice, participate in the training of new neurologists, and foster sustainable collaboration between Brazilian and European centres. Her project is titled, “Exploring the early prognostic value of KFLC Index in a real-life cohort of subjects diagnosed with multiple sclerosis”.
ECTRIMS Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Programme
This programme supports young neuroscientists to facilitate their conduct of and training in basic, clinical or applied research related to multiple sclerosis. The goal of the programme is to maximise the exchange of information and to help grow the pool of well-trained research scientists focused on problems in MS.
Dr Silvia Corbisiero, from Italy, will join the Dept. Brain Sciences, Division Neuroscience at Imperial College London in London, England. Her research focus has consistently centred on MS, beginning with foundational work during her undergraduate and master’s studies, where she investigated the pathogenic role of oligodendrocytes and analysed post-mortem brain tissue from MS patients provided by the UK MS Brain Bank at Imperial College London. She said her “early exposure to CNS tissue and immunohistochemistry techniques first anchored my interest in the cellular and molecular determinants of neuroinflammation”. Her research project is titled, “Mapping the meningeal immune landscape in Multiple Sclerosis: a study of T and B cell interactions in post-mortem tissue”.
Dr Hanna Frank, from Germany, will be work at the Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway. She says this fellowship will give her the opportunity to strengthen essential skills in longitudinal causal inference methodology for her research career. Her goal is to become a leading biostatistical epidemiologist specialising in the intersection of comorbidity, the MS prodrome, and disease progression. Her research project, “Healthcare use before multiple sclerosis onset and subsequent disability progression: a population-based study”, will explore whether the reasons for healthcare use in the years leading up to clinical MS symptom onset are related to disability outcomes after symptom onset.
Anna Stölting, from Germany, will work at the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Humanitas University in Milan, Italy. In pursuing this fellowship, she says her long-term goal is to build a research career at the intersection of neuroimaging and neuropathology, with a particular focus on understanding chronic inflammatory lesion activity in multiple sclerosis. She says, “Working on PRL heterogeneity has shown me how much remains unexplored in chronic active MS lesions, and it has motivated me to pursue training that allows me to link imaging findings with cellular and molecular data”. Her project is titled, “Decoding paramagnetic rim lesion heterogeneity in multiple sclerosis using post-mortem MRI and spatial transcriptomics”.
ECTRIMS Nurse and Allied Health Professional Training Fellowship
This programme is for nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists, and related allied health care professionals to obtain or expand their expertise in MS through practical experience and training in a mentored MS environment in Europe. Its aim is to enhance the care and support of individuals with MS by fostering improved clinical care, education, and best practices in MS care throughout Europe.
Dr Elnaz Melhi, from Iran, will work at the School of Health Sciences, College of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences at the University of Galway in Galway, to obtain advanced knowledge and practical experience in Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) and the Cognitive Occupation-Based Programme for PwMS (COB-MS). As a psychologist, she is committed to improving mental health care for people living with chronic physical illnesses. Her project is titled, “Development and Evaluation of Researcher and PPI Versions of EPPIIC (Evaluation of PPI for Interventional Research Checklist)”.
ECTRIMS-MAGNIMS Fellowship Programme
The joint fellowship between ECTRIMS and the European Magnetic Resonance Imaging in MS network (MAGNIMS) aims to foster the development of young researchers in the field of MS by supporting their work on scientific projects at host institutions within the MAGNIMS network in Europe.
Mar Barrantes-Cepas, from Spain, will join University Hospital Basel, Biomedical Engineering of the University Basel in Basel, Switzerland, where she will continue her scientific career as a researcher dedicated to using advanced MRI to translate pathology into clinical applications that improve diagnosis and treatment in multiple sclerosis. She will pursue her project, “LET’S RECONNECT MS! Lesion-Driven Network Disconnection and Remyelination in Multiple Sclerosis”.
Lonneke Bos, from the Netherlands, will conduct her fellowship in the Neuroradiology Department at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. In the coming years, her goal is to build a career at the intersection of technical innovation and clinical impact. She believes her training in medical imaging has given her a strong technical foundation, from developing and validating image-analysis pipelines to working with advanced MRI sequences, quantitative volumetrics, and reproducible computational workflows. Her collaborative MAGNIMS project is titled, “Brain Age Related Multiple Sclerosis Severity Score (BARMSS): Improved prediction of clinical outcomes using MRI”.
MSIF-ECTRIMS McDonald Fellowship Programme
The joint MSIF-ECTRIMS McDonald Fellowship enables early career multiple sclerosis researchers from low- and middle-income countries to work in a research institution outside of their own country. During the two-year programme, participants either gain expertise or carry out joint research projects.
Dr Reza Naeimi, from Iran, will be conducting his fellowship at the University of Alberta, Canada, on a project titled, ‘From Silent Injury to Therapy: snRNA-seq of mDAWM Reveals Microglial States That Predict Repair Failure in MS’. He believes this fellowship will give him the tools to make “invisible” MS visible with a goal to build the first Iranian research program dedicated to decoding repair failure in progressive MS.
Stay tuned as we announce the awardees of the ECTRIMS-MEDEN Fellowship Programme in June 2026. Learn more about the ECTRIMS Fellowship Programmes: https://ectrims.eu/fellowships