After his study of psychology and computer science in Marburg, Germany, (1983-1988), Rainer Goebel has worked on artificial neural networks of visual processing. He did his PhD at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, (1990-1994) under Prof. Dirk Vorberg developing a large-scale oscillatory neural network model of scene segmentation, selective attention, and shape recognition. In 1993 he received the Heinz Maier Leibnitz Advancement award in cognitive science sponsored by the German minister of science and education for a publication on the binding problem and in 1994 he received the Heinz Billing award from the Max Planck society for developing a software package for the creation and simulation of neural network models. From 1995-1999 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt/Main in the Dept. of Neurophysiology under Prof. Wolf Singer where he founded the functional neuroimaging group. In 1997/1998 he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced studies ("Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin"). Since January 2000, he is a full professor for Cognitive Neuroscience in the psychology department of Maastricht University (see below for the text of his inaugural speech). He is also a member of the board of governors of the new F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, Netherlands. He is the director of the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre (M-Bic) , which celebrated its opening in spring 2005. In both centers, he is working on combining functional MRI and EEG/MEG, DTI, ICA and Granger Causality in order to noninvasively measure both the topographic distribution and the precise timing of neuronal processes in humans and to study anatomical as well as functional connectivity, both hypothesis driven as well as data driven. From 2006 on, he is the Research Director of the FPN Maastricht Research Institute together with Peter de Weerd. He is the developer of the fMRI data analysis software tool “brainvoyager” and “turbo brainvoyager” (see brainvoyager.com for more details).