I am a PhD student with a Master in Cognitive Neuroscience. One year ago, I completed my master with a specialization in plasticity and memory. During my internship, I worked on personalized planning and mapping of transcranial ultrasonic neuromodulation (TUS). Building a pipeline to compare different scan sequences to help deciding which parameters should be used for the best correlation signal showed us a very important message: The inference that can be drawn from your results strongly depends on the choice of resting-state fMRI sequence parameters.

After coding for a year, I decided that I really wanted to go back into clinical studies, where I joined the Parkinson Op Maat team in the Radboud UMC Nijmegen. Here, I worked as a researcher acquiring data from De Novo Parkinson patients in two observational studies. During that year, I learned many practical skills like blood drawing, assessing motor functioning and cognition but also many social skills whilst working with these participants.

Within the CureQ consortium, I will be working in the Radboud UMC as a PhD student on WP2 under supervision of Bart van de Warrenburg. I will collect data and samples from SCA patients and combine disease-specific clinimetrics with cerebral volumetric and neurochemical profiles.