Katrin Amunts is a German neuroscientist, well known for her work in human brain mapping. In order to better understand the organizational principles of the human brain, she and her team have created the cytoarchitectonic Juelich-Brain atlas, as a basis to integrate multi-level and multi-scale brain data into a common reference brain, and use methods of high-performance computing to generate ultra-high resolution human brain models.

Amunts is a full professor for Brain Research, and director of the C. and O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research, Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf (since 2013), and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Center Juelich. Since 2016, is the Scientific research director of the European flagship, the Human Brain Project.

She did a postdoctoral fellowship at the C. & O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Duesseldorf University, Germany, and the set up a new research unit for Brain Mapping at the Research Center Juelich, Germany. In 2004, she became professor for Structural-Functional Brain Mapping, and in 2008 a full professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the RWTH Aachen University as well as director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at the Research Center Juelich.

She is a member of the editorial board of Brain Structure and Function. She was member of the German Ethics Council 2012-2020. Katrin Amunts is the programme speaker of the programme Decoding the Human Brain of the Helmholtz Association, Germany. Since 2017 Amunts is co-speaker of the graduate school Max-Planck School of Cognition and since 2018 she is a member of the International Advisory Council Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives, Canada.