Ruben P. Dörfel

PhD Student at the Centre for Psychiatry Research, Karolinska Institutet and Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet.

I am a biomedical engineer and data scientist with an interest in applied problems across machine learning, applied statistics, and neuroimaging. My research focuses on developing and validating imaging biomarkers of biological brain ageing. I am particularly interested in how such biomarkers can support translational research and drug development.

Research Focus

  • Biomarker development and validation — assessing predictive performance, test–retest reliability, and clinical validity of brain age as a biomarker (Human Brain Mapping, 2023; EBioMedicine, 2026).
  • Multimodal imaging — combining structural MRI with 5-HT2AR PET to predict brain age (GeroScience, 2024).
  • Imaging analysis and pipeline development for clinical trials — leading the multimodal image analysis and processing pipelines in ERAP (medRxiv, 2025), a pilot phase II trial of rapamycin in Alzheimer’s disease..
  • Machine learning and applied statistics — longitudinal modelling of brain ageing in large clinical and population cohorts, including ADNI and UK Biobank (medRxiv, 2025).
  • Reproducible research software — open-source tools for neuroimaging analysis and scientific computing (see projects).

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to collaborate. I’m always open to new ideas and projects, particularly seeking students with a computer science background to work on neuroimaging and machine learning projects.

Short Bio

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany, and a Master of Science from the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen. My work has combined research software engineering with applied data analysis throughout. As an intern at the MEG Lab of the MGH/HST Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, I developed real-time movement estimation and correction for MEG measurements, contributing to the open-source framework MNE-CPP with support from the BND Summer of Code scholarship. As a student software engineer at Demant A/S, I built a unit-testing framework and improved the continuous integration pipeline for hearing-aid development.

I began working on neuroimaging and brain ageing at the Neurobiology Research Unit during my master’s, with a research stay at the Centre for Psychiatry Research, and continued there as a research assistant before starting my PhD. In 2026, I was a visiting PhD student at the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, working on longitudinal modelling and machine learning with UK Biobank data.